b2b sales business plan

• B2B Sales and Marketing

How to Create a Winning B2B Sales Plan [+ Free Template]

• Last updated December 20, 2022
• By Jessica Huhn

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Are you ready to be the next rockstar of your company’s sales meeting? Whether you work for a new business or an established one, keep reading to learn everything about how to create a sales plan that brings you more clients. And after that, you can download our free sales plan template and get started making one of your own.

What is a B2B sales plan?

Before diving too deep, it’s helpful to go over a quick sales plan definition. These plans are ways for companies to strategize and set goals for their sales departments.

There are several beneficial reasons to create this type of action plan. One reason is because these plans give your team clear objectives to carry out. Also, the research you perform while creating this type of business plan often uncovers new opportunities for your team. Lastly, these types of plans also allow for performance and goal tracking. This is a great way to find out if your team is growing stronger in their sales skills or if problems need addressing.

Now, let’s go over what you need to include in your company’s sales plan.

What should you include in your strategic sales plan?

There are many sections you’ll want to include in this type of action plan for your team. Considering that, it’s helpful to learn more about these important sections. Here is a quick overview of each section of a standard sales plan.

1. Introduction

Typically, the beginning of this plan is where you give a brief introduction of what this plan is going to cover. While it’s usually at the beginning, most people find it easier to create this 2–3 sentence introduction after formulating all other sections of this plan.

2. Sales team structure

This next section provides key information about the structure of your team. This includes roles and responsibilities, as well as how general reporting flows through the entire department. Sales team structures also often include information about new hires, recent promotions, location changes, sales process changes, and other updates to the structure of your team .

3. Market position/industry

Another important part of this kind of plan involves listing information about your position within your industry. To do this, you’re going to need to find and report information about your competition. You might think that this sounds impossible, how can I find information about how well a competitor is doing? Fortunately, digital marketing tools make it easy to research your competition and find out more about traffic totals, brand reach, and other important metrics.

4. Target audience

It’s also a good idea to research your company’s ideal customers while creating this type of business plan. One reason to do this is because the audience a sales team is targeting can change due to lots of factors. By keeping this information updated, you’ll be able to let everyone reading your plan clearly know who your target customers are and why.

5. Challenges

Think of your company’s sales plan as a story. And no good story is complete without challenges for the characters to overcome. With that in mind, this section is where you’ll list the challenges your team faces and how you’ll overcome them. Think hard about this – you don’t want any unexpected surprises catching your team off guard.

6. Sales goals (short/long-term)

It’s also important to include a goals section in this plan. Challenges your team faces, listed in the section above, focus on things that are out of your team’s control . Goals, while still challenging, deal with things that your sales team can control.

Short-term plans measure goals that span from weeks to quarters, while longer-term plans can range from six months to years.

Also, use this section as a quick way to set any goals or key performance indicators for your sales team to achieve. This can include celebrating a certain number of new clients , a growth in total sales over the last period, expansion into new territories, and similar types of information.

7. Plan of action (sales strategy)

No sales plan is complete without a plan of action. Here, you’ll want to list the specific steps your team will use to achieve their individual and group goals. To make sure everyone is on the same page and has a clear direction of the end goal, include lots of data and actionable steps in this section of your sales plan.

8. Finances

Whether it’s a small business or large corporation, every company operates on some type of budget. Considering that, it’s essential to include financial information in your company’s sales plan. You’ll want to present accurate sales budget information including what’s available and how you plan on allocating this budget across your department. This is also a great opportunity to list sales totals and revenue targets compared to previous weeks/months/quarters/years. Also, make sure you use this section to list other types of financial goals your team is going after.

You don’t need to overthink your plan’s summary. Much like the introduction, use the summary as a way to frame a nice 2–3 sentence wrap-up that focuses on the future of your sales team.

5 steps to create a winning B2B sales action plan

Now, it’s time to learn a few tips on how to best write one of these plans. By using these tips, you’ll have plenty of information to include in your company’s sales plan.

1. Have realistic goals

It would be nice to impress your boss with a lofty goal that would make any sales manager raise their eyebrows. But struggling to meet nearly impossible goals isn’t going to end up pleasing anyone. Instead, make sure your goals are realistic, based on previous sales information and accurate forecasting.

For help with creating goals, use the SMART system , which stands for:

Using this system can help ensure your sales team are creating goals that are challenging yet achievable. Also, by digging deeper into proposed goals with the SMART system, you can easily remove those that aren’t worth pursuing.

2. Back up what you’re saying with data

While creating this type of plan, it’s easy to make general statements about upcoming goals. However, without data, it’s hard to back up anything you’re saying. Essentially, this creates a plan that might look great and read well but has nothing concrete to back up the statements it makes.

3. Research your company’s target audience

Every company has its own type of target audience. You might even have multiple target audiences. To make it easier to reach this audience, take the time to find out more about their specific needs. Performing this type of research can also help you uncover lots of prospecting opportunities with possible new customers.

4. Involve all sales employees during the sales plan creation process

What group of people know the most about the challenges and opportunities your sales department faces? Your sales team. As you prepare this type of plan, make sure to get your sales team’s opinion and thoughts. Chances are, you’ll gain valuable insights and have a much stronger presentation with your whole sales team behind you.

5. Take a closer look at your competitors

If you’re like most people, you don’t want to dwell on your company’s competition. However, this is necessary if you want to create a strong plan that succeeds in the market. You can gain lots of valuable insight by looking at competitor data. Of course, no competitor is going to give you the keys to their kingdom. Instead, find the information you need by using digital marketing tools and programs to get the upper hand.

You’ll want to look for publicly available information about your competitors including:

• Social media : Utilize social listening to take a close look at your competitors’ followers, shares, likes, and similar engagement metrics.
• SEO results : With the help of a few marketing automation tools , you can learn more about the online presence of your company’s competition.
• Competitor news: While looking over this type of information, look for anything else your brand’s sales team can capitalize on.

Download our exclusive, free sales plan template

If you don’t want to create a plan from scratch, we completely understand. Most salespeople find themselves dealing with lots of things to take care of and simply don’t have time to sit down to create a lengthy sales plan.

No need to worry, we’ve got you covered with our downloadable sales plan template, just click the image below to download it. This template includes everything we’ve covered above in a clean layout. Feel free to make it your own, and share this page with other colleagues you feel would benefit from this template.

To wrap things up, sales plans are great ways to take a closer look inside of your sales department. With these clear steps and the right relevant data, you’ll be able to create an effective sales plan that gives everyone on your team a clear picture of the road that lies ahead.

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How to Create a B2B Sales Plan: Template + Examples

A sales plan is an essential tool for any business, especially in B2B. It provides a roadmap for achieving your sales goals. By clearly outlining your strategies and tactics, a well-crafted sales plan will keep you on track and help you measure your progress along the way.

Creating a sales plan can seem daunting, but it doesn’t have to be. This article lays out a structure for a sales plan. We will extend this article over time.

In this post, we’ll cover

What is a sales plan, what is the sales planning process, what are typical elements of a sales plan, executive summary, key assumptions for this sales plan (examples), target customers and related products / services, business planing, initiatives and measures, required resources, overall outcome of a sales plan, sales plan in one sentence, sales plan examples.

A sales plan is a document that encompasses goals, target customers, and sales strategy aimed at attaining necessary results. It enables a company’s leadership and sales team to plan concrete measures and initiatives to achieve the defined business outcomes as well as predict business-related risks and steps to avoid them.

• Gather historic sales data
• Define your objectives including existing business plans
• Define your assumptions going into sales planning
• Determine metrics for success
• Determine current situation
• Start sales forecasting based on current performance
• Identify gaps to success metrics and business plan
• Ideate new initiatives to close gaps
• Involve stakeholders for feedback
• Outline action items and determine ressource requirements

A typical sales plan includes the following sections:

• Key assumptions
• Revenue Targets, Business Plan
• Strategies and Tactics (incl. Marketing initiatives)
• Pricing and Promotions, marketing and sales channels
• Deadlines and responsibiliites
• Team structure
• Market Conditions

Structure of sales strategy / quarterly sales plan

A structured sales plan provides clarity and guidance in a turbulent environment. Based on over 100 projects, we provide you with a suggested structure to map out specific goals, action items, and target dates for progress.

• What targets will you hit
• Which measures are you taking
• Which (incremental) ressources do you need
• Focus on product A and region B to generate the revenues
• Keep existing product mix
• Product improvements / innovation
• Other departments plans / confirmed actions
• Customer segments, ABC-analysis
• Geographical split
• Market size and penetration today and in future
• Performance based on previous performance (“bottom-up 1”) potentially: variance analysis of actual results vs. plan of previous timeframe
• Performance based on realistic & ambitious estimates from managerial experience (“bottom-up 2”)
• top-down targets from business plan (communicated towards shareholders) (“top-down”)
• Gap analysis between today “bottom-up 1”, “bottom-up 2” and “top-down”
• Decision, which plan (named “ sales plan “) will be basis for next timeframe
• number of resources / seller
• avg. revenue per deal
• ramp-up time per seller
• target achievement per seller
• product / country / margin mix
• Employee churn
• Customer churn
• As needed: “sales plan” breakdown to quarters, months, weeks and days.
• As needed: breakdown “sales plan” to teams and individuals incl. 10-20% buffer for every hierachy level
• Prepare: Development of measures to fill gap to get to “sales plan”

• 3-5 key initiatives to deliver the “sales plan” as outlined above
• Each initiative is linked to 3-7 specific measures linked to metrics and financial outcomes
• employee churn
• customer churn
• Each measure is linked to one person responsible and has a clear timline
• Ideally: every initiative can be measured by specific KPIs (to see if progress is made)
• FTE resources Marketing
• FTE resources Sales
• Budgets (team, budget for marketing, new tools or incentives / SPIFFs)
• IT support for implementation of new sales tools
• Product management for changes to product / services
• Customer Success / Account Management
• Which marketing channels will be used
• Which sales channels will be used
• Overview: which team approaches what type of customers through which channel and which product / service offering
• Planning of all initiatives and tasks for upcoming timeframe incl. responsibilities
• Financial planning sales / P&L in collaboration with controlling department
• Overview of all requirements to other departments / companies and shareholders to achieve the plan
• Outlook for timeframe following the planned timeframe (t+1)

We will achieve an overall goal of 1,3 m€ in net new ARR in Q1/23. For this I need 500 k€ (in budget and headcount, 100 k€ incremental budget required) and the defined support from the organization / shareholders.

Over time, we will link examples of sales plans in this section.

Jens Hutzschenreuter

Jens is a previous B2B Sales leader (Groupon, ryd), ex-Management Consultant with Boston Consulting Group and is now supporting ~50 B2B sales organizations annually in developing systems, structure and processes to scale an organization up to 250 sellers.

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How to Create a B2B Sales Plan (a GTM Guide)

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The platform for orchestrating performance.

For sales managers, planning for the future can feel quite different from stomping out fires in the present. Efficiently structuring your market opportunities and deploying your sales team to match is how sales leaders translate high-level strategy into execution in the field.

Sales planning is complex, especially in B2B. Complexity creates opportunities. The more that sales organizations can organize their customers and prospects and then empower their sales team to effectively deliver on those opportunities, the more successful they’ll be at beating the competition.

Read on to learn what sales planning is, how to optimize it in B2B, and what best practices develop a successful sales planning process.

What is Sales Planning?

Sales Planning is how a sales organization slices up the market and aligns its sales team to fit. Sales planning is the crucial link that connects high-level strategy—goals, markets, products—with execution in the field.

By optimizing its sales planning, a sales organization can make sure that it pairs the right salespeople with the right accounts and that it groups accounts most efficiently. It can ensure that the way it organizes customers and prospects remains in sync with the company’s overall sales goals. Good sales planning also puts a company’s salespeople in the best position to succeed.

Sales planning comprises the key building blocks of a sales strategy: sales quota planning, territory planning, account segmentation and scoring, and sales capacity planning. By optimizing these and connecting them to one another, a sales organization can increase the productivity of its sales force, reduce attrition and, ideally, raise its bottom line.

What’s the difference between Sales Planning and a Sales Plan?

A sales plan is something a sales leader (or a team of sales leaders) make once, or maybe once a year; sales planning is an ongoing activity. In this way, companies who shift from making a sales plan to doing sales planning year-round are able to stay more flexible and can more quickly adapt to market or other business changes.

The transition from making a sales plan to doing sales planning becomes more important the more a sales team grows and a company’s sales strategy matures. As the sales strategy integrates more and more moving pieces—which can be people, products, territories, customers, markets, currencies, geographies, or any other element—it’s critical that sales leadership be able to address changes as they happen.

Rather than seeing a sales plan as an inflexible framework that to be rigidly adhered to at all moments, sales leaders should view sales planning as an evolving set of modifiable guidelines that help a sales organization best fulfill its goals. Taking this approach helps a sales team to figure out the best way to address its key priorities, even if those priorities change.

4 Steps to Create a Sales Plan in B2B

Sales planning generally includes those aspects of the sales strategy that deal with organizing prospects and coordinating the sales team, including account segmentation and scoring, sales quota planning, territory planning, and sales capacity planning.

Account Segmentation and Scoring

Account segmentation and scoring is how sales organizations classify and group their opportunities. Doing both effectively helps sales teams understand which markets, products, and customers they should target to best grow their business, which opportunities are ripe for cross-selling or upselling, and how the company’s salespeople are best deployed.

Both account segmentation and account scoring exert a downstream influence in the sales organization, helping determine how that organization plans its territories and quotas, how it makes its forecasts, and how it interacts with other parts of the organization, including marketing and HR.

The key steps for evaluating sales opportunities

There are three key steps for developing an initial understanding of sales opportunities:

Define account segments

A good segmentation strategy begins with knowing which attributes are most important to your company’s success, and which allow you to most efficiently group accounts by sales strategy. Accounts can be grouped by any number of criteria: industry, revenue, prior-year sales, employee headcount, wallet share, tenure, and more. Any of these may correlate with your product offerings (perhaps you have different products for different-sized companies, or companies in different industries), or with the salespeople in your company (perhaps your salespeople are better equipped to sell to companies in the same industry, even if those companies have different sizes. Perhaps the opposite is true.).

You can additionally segment accounts based on whether they are active or pipeline accounts that require further nurturing. Classifying accounts in this way can help you forecast revenues for the quarter or year.

Assess account potential

Sales managers are often lured by the rush of chasing after new business—but it’s often easier, faster, and cheaper to sell to an existing customer than to get a foot in the door with a new account. Take a look at prior-year sales and identify key active accounts with large expansion opportunity. Then calculate the potential ROI of devoting different resources to existing accounts versus potential new ones.

Collaborate with front-line salespeople but incorporate actual data

Make prioritizing and ranking accounts a collaborative process between sales leaders and front-line salespeople, like field managers and sales reps. Front-line teams work with your customers daily and often have valuable insights that can help calculate account growth potential versus exhausted accounts.

At the same time, make sure that you have data to reinforce whatever hunches your sales people might have. In this way, account segmentation can be a bi-directional process: front-line salespeople can give you insights into how to read your data, and data can help front-line salespeople better prioritize their activities.

Sales Quota Planning

Did you know that 50 percent of organizations create five to ten iterations of their sales quota plans before rolling those quotas out to the field? Here are some tips for setting more effective sales quotas.

Weigh past performance against future opportunity

Many organizations set their sales quotas based on the historical performance of individual sales reps, but that can unintentionally discourage collaboration or penalize your best salespeople. Instead of simply upping last year’s quotas, take a closer look at the overall market opportunity and make sure your quotas are encouraging the behaviors that best fit the unique drivers in your market.

Use technology to monitor and measure the results

The key for setting better quotas is to use the right technology to evaluate effectiveness. “The right technology” means technology designed to do this sort of work.

For example, you’re probably using a CRM to monitor data for leaders and sales teams and to keep track of leads, calendars events, meetings, and deadlines. But this kind of technology doesn’t collect the information you need to design good quotas. Nor can it consolidate, reorganize, and track data in the forms you need.

Instead, you need technology that can collect and analyze sales data automatically, and that can supply this data when you need it.

Strike the right balance

Setting sales quotas is all about balance. Sales quotas need to meet the needs of your sales reps, your sales managers, and your company as a whole, while also syncing with your company’s overall business strategy. With a more transparent process, you’ll get sales reps buy-in to their sales quotas, which leads to their working harder toward reaching and exceeding those goals because they believe in the process and understand the decisions that produced those quotas.

Create a consistent process

A recent Anaplan survey found that 38 percent of companies suffer from a “lack of effective processes” when setting quotas. At many companies, the process changes yearly. For example, different sales reps might be assigned higher or lower quotas based on their past performance. When these kinds of variables are arbitrary, reps tend to ignore them. To keep both your field and leadership happy, determine a consistent process and stick to year after year.

Territory Planning

A recent article in Harvard Business Review found that by optimizing their sales territories, sales organizations can increase sales by two-to-seven percent without changing anything else about their strategy and without allocating resources any differently. Indeed, it’s crucial to evolve your territory and quota strategy to keep up as business priorities and objectives change.

Here are three tips for taking the guesswork out of territory planning and integrating your territory planning into your overall enterprise performance management strategy:

Use a data-driven approach

Territory and quota planning needs to be part of your team’s overall sales forecasting and sales analytics processes. Your organization likely has a massive amount of sales data. Look for ways to use this data to gain insights into where the biggest opportunities lie and how those opportunities are spread across your sales territories. Locate territories that show signs of growth and assign reps whose strengths best align with these opportunities. Make sure that your territory assignments and sales quotas are based on real data and solid trends, not just wishful thinking.

Listen to front-line sales managers and reps

As with quota-planning, creating sales territories should be a collaborative process. Instead of handing down the latest territory assignments from the top, work with sales managers and sales reps to get the latest intelligence from the front lines. Which territories are seen as particularly promising, and which ones are the backwaters that no one wants to work and why? Sales people are hyper-aware of opportunities, so take advantage of their insights and intuition to build a stronger sales performance management program.

Make a “living” plan

In the business of sales, you often have to improvise and respond to unforeseen circumstances. A territory plan should be similarly flexible. Be willing to modify your territory plans based on shifts in the economy, changing business priorities, or headcount changes.

Like “sales planning” versus “a sales plan,” territory plans shouldn’t be fixed entities; they should evolve with your sales strategy.

It’s for this reason that cloud-based sales planning tools are crucial for maintaining your territory plans. They’re far more flexible than any other solutions. Massive spreadsheets and legacy systems do not offer flexibility or visibility into scenario-based planning. With a cloud-based tool that gives a view into the whole sales organization, sales leaders can foresee the affects a change in territory or account strategy will have and can focus their teams on the most profitable accounts and regions.

With the right data-driven approach, enhanced collaboration, and the ability to do scenario-based planning, territory and quota plans can better align with overall revenue projections, as well as your organization’s big-picture business strategy.

Sales Capacity Planning

Having the right number of sales people deployed in all of the sales territories and assigned quota targets is critical to capturing all market opportunities and meeting revenue targets.

Sales Capacity Planning allows Sales and HR professionals to plan, model, and optimize the sales capacity and resource requirements, ensuring that the sales organization has complete coverage in all territories, eliminating the risk of unassigned quotas.

Top-down vs. bottom-up capacity planning

• Top-down Sales Capacity Planning: Take the goal and build a model that lists your current team and their quotas, and then add the “to be hired” assets to get enough quota coverage to hit the goal.
• Bottom-up Sales Capacity Planning: Look at your past performance, new information pertinent to the coming year, and your rate limiting factors, and build a model that will predict how much you can do.

Three steps to successful capacity planning

• Align sales capacity and resource requirements with territory and quota plans. Ensure that the sales team is leveraging every opportunity to meet revenue and quota targets.
• Connect sales capacity plans with HR hiring and recruitment plans. Make sure HR is recruiting and hiring the right number of sales reps at the right time for sales onboarding and training.
• Quickly identify sales capacity and resource gaps. Understand the impact of covering all sales territories and attaining quota targets.

How should you prepare for the Sales Planning process?

According to SiriusDecisions, preparation should begin at least 30 days before sales leadership gets together. To prepare, stakeholders should assemble the previous year’s sales and productivity data: customer counts, channel information, revenue by product, revenue by geography or business units, overall profits, costs, and anything else that can help with the processes described above. It’s key that sales leadership validate the data to ensure that it’s trustworthy.

Once sales leaders have collected data, they should comb through it to locate problem areas. Observing data in different time dimensions (yearly, quarterly, monthly) can help isolate trends, and potential areas of future success.

Before sales planning meetings, trends and conclusions drawn from the data should be packaged in a reader-friendly format and distributed to all stakeholders with enough time for decision-makers to internalize the results.

What are some best practices for Sales Planning?

Making sales planning easier can sometimes be a matter of adopting best practices and maintaining them as goals change. For example:

• Cross-organization collaboration

Because sales planning is about aligning the nuts and bolts of a sales strategy to corporate goals and objectives, sales planning needs to be viewed as a collaborative and interactive process. Planning meetings should involve stakeholders from across the organization. Be sure to include:

• Sales: CSO, Sales Operations, Sales Enablement
• Marketing: CMO, Marketing Operations
• Product: Head of Product, Product Marketing
• Gain a clear line of sight

To gain a competitive edge, sales leaders need to maintain clear line of sight into the behaviors of their sales reps and the reasons for those behaviors. In many companies, for example, sales reps find that too much of their time is spent on administrative tasks. OpenSymmetry states that that 65 percent of sales leaders report that spending too much time on non-selling activities is a top business issue for sales in the coming year. On the other hand, when companies invest in best-in-class sales performance management solutions, they experience 25 percent lower turnover rates, 36 percent shorter sales cycles, and seven percent more sales reps making their quota.

• Use metrics that matter

The sales organization’s ability to collect valid data over multiple years is critical to sales planning. Advanced technology can help extract nuggets of insight from vast amounts of data.

• Integrate your tools

Tools add efficiency to the sales planning process and make everything more accurate—but only if they are part of an integrated tool kit. To be done right, sales planning requires data from marketing, finance, workforce, and whatever business intelligence tools your organization uses. By adopting better tools, you can calculate territories and quotas much more quickly.

• Retain top talent

According to the BMS Quarterly Sales Index, 56 percent of sales leaders report that retaining good performers will be a big problem for them in the coming year. Adding to the problem is the fact that different companies lose talent for different reasons, which makes it hard to develop a universal solution. Because of this, many sales leaders simply increase salaries, hoping that this will retain the best people. Although this may work in the short term, retaining talent in the long term requires sales leaders to create a culture in which salespeople are able to do their best work.

What is the future of Sales Planning?

As sales organizations develop their sales planning, the more successful ones will adopt the practices described above: turning the yearly sales plan into ongoing sales planning; coordinating stakeholders from across the organization; adopting advanced technology to automate sales planning processes; using modeling capabilities to plan out new territory and quota scenarios.

As the sales world continues to develop, companies who can plan most effectively will be those who continue to beat their competitors. We encourage you to learn more about how sales planning software can help you meet these goals.

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How to Build a Sales Plan: The Step-by-Step Guide

So, you’ve developed a killer sales strategy . ✅

Your next step? Create a killer sales plan that will transform that deck full of goals and targets into tangible results, but also help understand your sales team’s performance all-round.

Sounds like a must-have, doesn’t it? That’s why we’re going to cover everything you need to know about building an effective sales plan, as well as help you out with strategic sales plan examples and templates to help you get started.

So then, let’s go.

What is a sales plan?

A sales plan is what outlines your sales team’s objectives and targets, as well as the steps, budget, and tools needed to get you there.

It includes specific revenue goals, information on your ideal customer profile (ICP), the chosen sales tactics, possible obstacles, threats, and necessary resources.

Creating a robust sales plan is really handy to anyone that works in sales. It helps everyone see the big picture, get aligned on goals, and understand their role in achieving them.

When you take the time to craft a sales plan, you will:

• Create a clear and accessible reference to understand company and sales-specific goals.
• Give your team the strategic direction it needs throughout every stage of the sales funnel.
• Provide guidance to sales leadership and outside the sales department, too.
• Build a foundation upon which to monitor progress and performance.

How to make a sales plan

An ideal sales plan consists of 13 key components:

• Company mission
• Goals and revenue targets
• Review of past performance
• Market and industry analysis
• Positioning
• Prospecting strategy
• Inbound marketing strategy
• Sales tactics
• Performance metrics

Let’s dive deeper into each of these components so you’ll understand exactly how to make a sales plan.

1) Company mission

What are we all doing here? If your sales team can’t answer this question, don’t expect to get too far. Before anyone starts selling anything, it’s important for each team member to understand the company’s mission, purpose, and vision.

• Why did the founders build the company?
• What exactly does your product or service do?
• What value does it provide customers?
• How does your company impact industry, society, or the world?

Taking the time to answer these questions helps your sales leadership, reps, and account managers start to see the bigger picture, which is essential for bringing your sales strategy to life.

2) Market and industry analysis

This is the part where you research the major trends, challenges, pain points, and opportunities in your market. If your company serves businesses across different industries, you’ll need to conduct this research for each and every one of them.

Having a deep understanding of your market and where it’s heading is crucial for holding meaningful conversations with prospects and providing real value.

You can do this using the Competitive Landscape view on Similarweb Sales Intelligence, but if you fancy it, you can venture over to our friend, Similarweb Research Intelligence to get even more detailed competitor and industry analysis.

3) Review of past performance

Reviewing your sales team’s past performance can be incredibly valuable while building a sales plan.

This is where you can gain a clearer understanding of what factors led your team to positive vibes (✨) and what contributed to not-so-positive vibes. Once you’ve narrowed down what works and what doesn’t, you can apply these insights to your future sales strategy.

Looking into past performance might highlight specific techniques that saw a big boost in revenue one quarter, or things like a sales manager leaving had a big impact on a team’s performance because they were key to the onboarding process.

These discoveries can – and should – impact your forward planning to make sure your next quarter is as good as can be.

4) Goal setting

Your sales goals will take the form of revenue goals and volume goals.

For example, you might set a total target revenue goal of $15 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR).

But you will might want to consider breaking down your targets in a number of ways, including:

• By product (eg. a particular product or service doing better than another)
• By region (eg. your North America region routinely performs better than your EMEA)
• By quarter (eg. your company closes the most deals in the fourth quarter, and the least in the first quarter)
• By individual reps (eg. highly experienced reps vs. reps that are new and being onboarded)

By taking these factors into consideration, you will be able apply ambitious yet achievable goals and targets for your team.

Another thing to consider: volume goals. You might aim to sign 80 new customers a year, but are you thinking about the size of the opportunities? For example, you might sign 30 Fortune 500 logos in that number. Breaking into new markets or shifting from medium-large-size companies to enterprise companies is just another example of the type of goals that should be closely tied to your overall business objectives.

One of the most important things to remember when setting goals is to make them realistic. If it is simply not possible to hit your targets with the budget, human capital, and marketing resources you have access to, you are setting yourself up for failure.

5) Ideal customer profiles (ICP)

Next up: it’s time to review your ideal customer profile (ICP). You should have a clearly defined ICP in your sales strategy. Why? Because your ICP is all about who would make the best long-term customer.

You can build this by looking at your current customer base, and seeing what characteristics make up your best performing or most loyal customers. Most ICPs are made up of demographic characteristics, including:

• Company size

However, these traits are broad and could easily produce a large list of prospects, including some companies that aren’t actually a good fit to your ICP. With a Sales Intelligence solution like Similarweb, you can enrich your prospects list with granular digital performance metrics, such as:

• Volume of sales per region
• Monthly/annual revenue
• Current tech stack
• Current partnerships (eg. existing in your CRM)

With our unique traffic and engagement data , Similarweb empowers sales teams with full digital visibility into every part of a prospect’s digital strategy and performance. This added information helps you weed out irrelevant prospects so you can focus on just the best potential customers – and win them.

6) Positioning

Positioning your company is all about determining how to best situate it within the current context of the market. This can be called market mapping , where you ask yourself questions like:

• Who are your competitors?
• How does your product or service compare?
• What are your relative strengths and weaknesses ?
• What is your competitors’ pricing and what is yours?

You’ll also want to focus on the technology trends or regulatory changes that impact the market as a whole, such as the rising popularity of a certain technology or the emergence of a new data privacy law. How will these factors impact your business and your competitors?

It might seem obvious, but going over your team can get overlooked in the sales planning process.

When looking at your team and its dynamic, you’ll want to ask yourself the following questions:

• What is the desired headcount?
• Which positions do we need to fill or eliminate?
• What is each rep, sales manager, or AE’s responsibility?
• Do we have a process in place for ramping up new hires?
• Do we have good sales mentors?
• How can we keep everyone aligned?

Despite the fact that sales involves lots of individual work, it’s a team sport at the end of the day. Sales success depends on effective training, sharing best practices, solid leadership, coaching, and accountability. So, go get it, team.

Your budget is going to need to stretch across all costs associated with reaching your sales goals, which usually includes:

• Human capital costs, such as salaries and commissions
• Sales training programs
• Sales technologies and tools
• Contest prizes and incentives
• Travel costs
• Conference exhibition costs

The more detailed your budget is, the easier it will be to make your case and get the spend your department needs.

9) Prospecting strategy

Sales prospecting is the process of identifying potential customers who fit your ICP with the goal of adding them to your sales funnel . Once you’ve got your list of relevant prospects and added them to the CRM, your next step is establishing a relationship and nurturing them until they are ready to become paying customers.

Prospecting is integral to an effective sales plan because it helps to make sure reps are going after the right kind of customers – and not wasting company time (or money) chasing the wrong ones.

If you’re prospecting manually, you’ll find that it’s a pretty time-consuming sales activity. In short: it’s no one’s favorite task. But with a robust prospecting tool, it makes your life a lot easier.

With Similarweb’s Sales Intelligence tool, you can quickly build a list of prospects who are ready to buy your product. Similarweb’s database includes more than 100 million websites and offers more than 50 digital criteria, to make sure you’re filtering out the misfits and leaving yourself with a list of good fits.

Our insights generator tool will also help you learn and understand more about the prospect’s market, and gain key insights on how your company can help grow their business, giving your sales pitch the edge you need to seal the deal.

10) Inbound marketing strategy

For this bit of the sales plan, you’ll need to collaborate with marketing to ensure you’re aligned on core objectives, business strategy, and target audience.

If you’re not on the same page about these things, each department could be spending time and money focusing on clashing target audiences. If you want to bring in high-quality leads, marketing and sales need to work together closely.

11) Sales tactics

Sales tactics are the actions you take to bring your sales strategy to life. When putting together your sales plan, you’ll want to dedicate some time to determine which tactics will help you achieve your goals most effectively.

Here are some of the sales tactics we always recommend:

• Truly listen and focus on solving problems
• Stay true to your word and follow through
• Rely on data to drive prospecting and boost outreach efforts
• Review your conversations with prospects

Check out our post on 10 sales tactics that will help you crush your quota for more!

12) Tech stack

At this point – now you’ve outlined all of your goals and needs – you’ll want to consider which tools your sales team needs to get the job done.

Your tool or tech stack should include things like:

• Customer relationship management (CRM)
• Sales Intelligence
• Prospecting and lead enrichment
• Analytics and reporting
• Process and training
• Meeting scheduling and recording

13) Performance metrics

The last piece of the puzzle is tracking and measuring your success, and seeing whether you met your goals.

Sales metrics and KPIs can vary company to company, but we’ve got a list of the 8 sales metrics you need to be tracking .

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4 strategic sales plan examples

If writing a sales plan from scratch feels a little bit overwhelming, you can take a deep breath. There are lots of existing sales plan examples out there that you can use and adapt to your needs.

Here are four strategic sales plan examples you can customize to bring your sales strategy to life (without the overwhelm).

1) 30-60-90-day sales plan

This sales plan example is used to help sales organizations stay on track towards achieving their goals. The idea is to set milestones for the 30-day, 60-day, and 90-day mark, so you can monitor progress within a given time period.

This type of plan works especially well for revenue-related goals, growing the volume of sales, or reducing customer churn. Additionally, new sales reps often use a 30-60-90-day sales plan to track their individual progress while ramping up.

2) Market expansion sales plan

A market expansion sales plan provides direction when your business is expanding into a new industry or territory. Bonus: it’s a list of tasks and relevant metrics to help set you up for success.

For example, if you’re expanding into a new territory, some tasks to check off could include:

• Increasing headcount
• Preparing training for new reps
• Researching regional markets and competition
• Determining accurate revenue and volume goals

While some metrics will just tell you whether or not you completed the task (such as, did you create additional training material that focuses on your new territory? Yes or no), others will require quantitative benchmarks (such as revenue-related goals).

3) New product sales plan

This sales plan example is perfect for when you’re preparing to launch a new product or service line. When you create a new product sales plan, the goal is to generate revenue from the new product. Therefore, the plan provides steps and guidance for incorporating the new product into your sales processes and pitch.

To get it right, you’ll want to:

• Perform competitive analysis ✅
• Determine how the new product impacts your brand and market position ✅
• Work with product marketing on the pitch ✅
• Identify which prospects and customers the new product will be relevant to ✅

4) Business development sales plan

With a business development sales plan, you can focus on using connections and building relationships to attract new potential customers. So on this kind of plan, your activities will be things like networking, sponsoring events, attending industry conferences, and performing cold outreach .

But like any sales plan, you’ll also need to determine which KPIs are most relevant.

One example: you’re an exhibitor at a large industry conference. Your KPIs might center on the number of badges your scan, number of meetings set, and number of follow-up meetings requested.

Or, when it comes to outreach, you’ll track how many prospects responded to you, scheduled meetings, and meet your qualification standards to measure your success.

Here’s another place that Similarweb Sales Intelligence comes in. It’s a tool that will make outreach a breeze. With the Insights Generator function, you can automate the task of finding relevant and compelling “insight nuggets” to include in sales emails. By mentioning specific stats related to their business or their competitors, you are sure to pique their attention.

Top sales plan templates

Another way to simplify the process of building a sales plan is to make the most of sales plan templates.

A “fill-in-the-blank” structure makes everything a little less complicated, right?

However, if you do choose to use a sales plan template, you’ve got to invest time and energy into customizing it to the very last detail so it’s totally relevant to your sales team.

Try these *customizable* templates out for size:

1) Hubspot sales plan template

Hubspot’s free template includes questions and steps to cover the following sections:

• Company History & Mission
• Team Structure
• Target Market
• Tools and Software
• Marketing Strategy
• Prospecting Strategy
• Action Plan

With guiding questions in each section, it can help you clearly articulate all of the necessary information you have to offer.

2) Leadfeeder’s B2B sales plan template

Leadfeeder’s template is designed to help B2B companies produce an actionable sales plan that you can put to use straight away.

It includes:

• Dedicated space to add your objectives and KPIs in a visual and structured way
• Sales projections for the quarter with all necessary calculations to hit your revenue goals
• Pipeline dashboard with deal size

According to Leadfeeder, their sales plan template is best for B2B companies that have a product that requires demos, meetings, and runs through multiple decision makers. Noted.

3) Asana sales plan template

Asana’s template takes a project management approach to sales planning by visualizing all of the tasks in your sales plan as a checklist. This approach helps you assign tasks to certain individuals, as well as set deadlines.

One of the benefits of Asana’s sales plan template is that it accounts for dependencies, so no crucial task can go (accidentally) unseen.

One way they do this? Your colleague won’t be able to check off the “draft buyer personas” task until you’ve completed and ticked “perform market research”.

Creating a sales plan doesn’t need to be hard

Having a sales plan is all well and good, but having an efficient sales plan is essential to your success.

Like we said, sure, it can be overwhelming, but tons of great salespeople before you have done the legwork for you. Today, you have plenty of strategic sales plan examples, sales plan templates, and sales tools to help get you going.

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How To Create a B2B Sales Plan in 2024 [Free Template]

Need help creating a B2B sales plan that aligns with your business goals? You’ve come to the right place. Whether you need help creating a sales plan or want to improve it, we’re here to help. 

When you work in sales, you understand that you can have the best team, and be the best salesperson, but without a solid sales plan, there will be no success. A good sales plan provides a team with a roadmap for achieving sales goals. It effectively outlines the strategies, tactics, and actions needed to achieve results. Whether you’re a salesperson going 20 years strong in the game, a sales manager, or even fresh out of college—  every salesperson can benefit from having a well-organized, actionable sales plan. So, let’s get started.

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What is a Sales Plan?

A sales plan is a comprehensive document that outlines how your business will achieve its sales goals. It’s more than “just a document” – it’s an extensive framework outlining specific targets, tactics, and strategies to reach sales goals and the resources required. A sales plan is instrumental in aligning your sales team’s efforts with your overall business strategy, ensuring that everyone is working towards a common goal within a specific time frame.

In the B2B market, a sales plan takes on added complexity due to longer sales cycles, the importance of relationship building, and typically higher transaction values. It demands a deeper understanding of client businesses, their industry, and their specific challenges. 

Advantages of a Sales Plan

There are numerous benefits to creating a sales plan, despite it seeming like an extra step in the busy world of sales. Let’s highlight why having a well-thought-out sales plan is a game-changer for your business:

• Direction and Clarity: A sales plan provides clear direction for your team. It outlines specific goals and the steps needed to achieve them, eliminating confusion and keeping everyone on the same page.
• Resource Optimization: With a sales plan, you can allocate resources more effectively, ensuring that your team’s efforts and budget are focused on high-impact activities.
• Enhanced Accountability: A detailed plan assigns specific tasks and objectives to team members, fostering a sense of responsibility and accountability for achieving targets.
• Better Tracking and Measurement: A sales plan allows you to track progress against predefined goals, making it easier to measure success and identify areas for improvement.
• Increased Adaptability: By regularly reviewing your sales plan, you can quickly adapt to market changes, customer needs, and internal business shifts, keeping your sales strategy agile and responsive.

By understanding these benefits, you can approach sales planning not just as a formality, but as a strategic tool that empowers your team and drives business growth.

What is the Process of Creating a B2B Sales Plan?

You might be wondering, “Is there seriously a process in making a plan?” And the answer is absolutely, and it’s a crucial one. The preparation process is like laying the foundation for your solid sales plan. First off, take a good, hard look at where your business stands. What’s been working? What hasn’t? This is about getting real with your past performance and learning from it.

Next up, it’s time for some detective work – market research. Get the lowdown on industry trends , what your competitors are up to, and who your ideal customers are. This isn’t just busy work; it’s gathering the intel you need to make smart, informed decisions in your sales plan.

The process can be broken down into four essential steps:

• Analyze and Set Goals
• Develop Strategies
• Implement Tactics and Allocate Resources
• Monitor, Review, and Adapt

How to Plan for Success and Realistic Results

When planning for success, being realistic is key. It’s essential to set ambitious goals, but they must be grounded in reality. This means considering the potential challenges your industry might face, like economic downturns or shifts in market demand. It also involves acknowledging your team’s capabilities and limitations, including increased churn. Unrealistic goals can lead to frustration and demotivation, while achievable targets can keep your team motivated and focused.

Planning for realistic results also means being adaptable. The B2B market can be unpredictable, with shifts in industry trends, regulatory changes, and technological advancements. Your sales plan should be flexible enough to accommodate these changes. Regular reviews and adjustments to the plan are crucial to stay aligned with the evolving market conditions. This adaptability ensures that your team remains agile and responsive, able to tackle challenges and seize new opportunities as they arise.

What is Your Sales Plan Goal?

Defining the goal of your sales plan is about understanding what success looks like for your business. It’s crucial to have a clear vision of what you aim to achieve with your sales efforts. This could range from increasing market share, launching a new product successfully, expanding into new territories, or boosting customer retention rates.

Your sales plan goal should align with your overall business objectives and reflect your company’s vision and values. It should be specific enough to provide direction and broad enough to allow for growth and adaptation. A well-defined goal serves as a benchmark for success, helping you measure the effectiveness of your sales plan. It provides your team with a clear target to aim for and a sense of purpose, driving all efforts towards a common objective.

Sales Plan vs. Sales Strategy

So, between a sales plan and a sales strategy , what’s the difference? If you’ve ever created both and wondered how they differ, let’s clear that up.

A sales strategy is your overarching blueprint. It’s the groundwork of your sales efforts, defining the foundation of how you’ll reach your market and stand above your competitors. Think of it as the guiding principle behind your sales operations. It sets the tone for how your team approaches sales, focusing on long-term goals like market positioning, customer segmentation, and overall direction.

Meanwhile, a sales plan is more about execution. It’s your roadmap for putting the sales strategy into action. This plan dives into the specifics – setting sales targets, defining the steps to hit those targets, and allocating resources. It’s about the who, what, when, and how of your daily sales activities, structured around achieving the objectives outlined in your sales strategy.

Types of Sales Plans

Now that we’ve covered the basics of what a sales plan is, let’s explore the various types of sales plans available. Selecting the right type of sales plan is crucial for achieving your B2B sales goals. Each type of plan serves a different purpose and suits different aspects of your business strategy.

Focus Planning:

Focus Planning in sales targets specific aspects or objectives within your sales strategy, ensuring a concentrated approach to different areas of your business.

• Strategic Sales Plan : Focuses on long-term goals and broad strategies for market expansion and new product introductions.
• Tactical Sales Plan : Details short-term actions and tactics to meet immediate sales targets, acting as a playbook for the near future.
• Operational Sales Plan : Involves day-to-day management of the sales team, handling budgets, and aligning tasks with larger sales goals.
• Account-Based Sales Plan : Targets specific, high-value accounts with tailored strategies to maximize the value of each key client relationship.

Time-Frame Planning:

Time-frame planning aligns sales activities with specific periods, ensuring that strategies are timely and goals are met within set intervals.

• Annual Sales Plan : Outlines the company’s long-term goals for sales over the next year.
• Quarterly Sales Plan : Breaks down annual goals into quarterly targets for more focused and adaptable strategies.
• Monthly Sales Plan : Provides month-to-month tactics and goals, so you can react quickly to market changes

Selecting the right sales plan or mix of plans for your business and executing them with precision is the key to success, ensuring that your sales efforts are effective and aligned with your company.

How to Write a Sales Plan

Writing a sales plan can seem daunting, but it’s really about breaking down your big strategy. In addition, creating a successful sales plan requires not just strategic insight, but also effective collaboration and clear writing. Here are some tips to help you craft a sales plan that is both comprehensive and easily understandable:

• Break Down the Plan into Actionable Steps
• Use Simple, Jargon-Free Language
• Encourage Feedback and Collaboration

Remember, a good sales plan is clear, concise, and above all, actionable. It should serve as a clear guide for your team, so they know exactly what needs to be done and when. And if you need more help, we’ve outlined how to create a B2B sales plan in the next section, so read on. 

How To Create a B2B Sales Plan  

Now that we’ve covered the essentials of what a sales plan is and its various types, it’s time to roll up our sleeves and tackle the creation of a B2B sales plan. This isn’t just about jotting down some goals and strategies; it’s about crafting a detailed, actionable roadmap that will guide your team to achieve real, measurable results. So, let’s walk through the key steps to create a B2B sales plan that resonates with your business objectives and propels your team toward success.

Step 1: Create or Revisit Your Mission Statement

First things first, let’s talk about your mission statement. If you haven’t got one, now’s the perfect time to craft a statement that captures the spirit of your business. Why does your business exist? What are its core values? If you already have a mission statement, dust it off and give it a thorough review. The goal here is to ensure that your sales plan is a direct reflection of your business’s core purpose and values. Your mission statement will serve as a guide throughout the sales planning process, ensuring that every goal and action is aligned with what your business truly stands for.

Step 2: Define Your Target Market

With your mission statement as your guide, identify who your ideal customers are.  Learn as much as you can about your ideal customer. This is about going beyond basic demographics. Dive into the specifics – what challenges do your potential clients face, and how can your product or service address these challenges? Understanding your target market is critical for tailoring your sales approach effectively. This step is about honing in on your market segment and understanding the nuances that drive their purchasing decisions.

Step 3: Conduct a SWOT Analysis

A SWOT Analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) of your business in relation to the target market provides invaluable insights. What are the strengths that you can leverage? What weaknesses need to be addressed? Are there untapped opportunities in the market? What threats should you be aware of? This analysis will help you build a sales plan that’s both realistic and ambitious.

Step 4: Set Clear, Measurable Goals

What exactly do you want to achieve with your sales plan? Set specific, measurable goals. Whether it’s increasing revenue by a certain percentage, acquiring a set number of new clients, or expanding into a new market, your goals should be clear and measurable. This makes tracking progress and monitoring success straightforward.

Step 5: Develop Your Sales Strategies

Remember when we compared a sales plan to a sales strategy? This is where strategy comes into play! Based on your understanding of the target market and your set goals, develop the sales strategies that will get you there. This might include direct sales, digital marketing campaigns, attending trade shows , or leveraging partnerships. Each strategy should align with your overall business objectives and be tailored to your target market.

Daily activity expectations should be outlined as well. The number of phone calls, prospecting emails, and LinkedIn messages should be written down, reviewed with your sales team, and agreed upon so that daily metrics are hit consistently, producing consistent results.

Finally, choose a selling system your team will use to win clients: Sandler, Spin Selling, Dale Carnegie, and many others are available. The system is important, but more importantly, for you as the leader, you must declare that you have a system in which your team will learn, master, and execute.

Step 6: Outline the Sales Tactics

Now, break down your strategies into specific tactics. This is the action part of your plan. What steps will you take to implement your strategies? This could involve setting up a series of targeted email campaigns, scheduling sales calls, or developing a referral program. Each tactic should have a clear owner and a timeline.

In addition, using your selling system as a basis, you can write down your sales process and exactly how you expect reps to proceed through a sales call. Start by asking yourself, “What 5 questions do I want my team to ask on every sales call”.. then with that information, your team can build solutions based on customer needs.

Step 7: Allocate Resources

For your plan to be actionable, you need to allocate the necessary resources. This includes budget, list-building tools, LinkedIn, personnel, CRM software, and other sales enablement tools. You also want to have a meal and travel budget for times your reps must visit clients to seal the deal! Overall, you must ensure that each element of your sales plan is backed by the resources needed to execute it effectively.

Step 8: Monitor and Adapt

Finally, a sales plan is not set in stone. The market can change, and so can your business’s internal dynamics. Set up regular intervals to review the progress of your sales plan. Be prepared to adapt and tweak your strategies and tactics in response to market feedback and changing business conditions. Effective monitoring helps you stay on track, identify areas for improvement, and make informed decisions to keep your sales efforts aligned with your goals.

Ready-To-Use B2B Sales Plan Template

To make your journey in creating a B2B sales plan smoother, we’ve developed a ready-to-use template. This template is designed to guide you through each step of the sales planning process, ensuring you cover all the essentials.

Making a Sales Plan Doesn’t Have to Be Complicated

We know, we just went through a lot of steps and considerations for creating a sales plan. But here’s the thing: it doesn’t have to be that complicated. Whether you’re a seasoned salesperson or a business owner, you know your goals, your values, and what you stand for. With that as your foundation, building a plan that suits your needs and drives results becomes much more straightforward.

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The #1 B2B Sales Strategy Explained Step by Step

B2B sales strategy has undoubtedly shifted over the past few years.

Previously, the goal (as a general rule) was to sell at any cost. It didn’t necessarily matter if the product or service solved a client’s exact pain points, so long as the sale went through.

Then the financial crash happened, changing the entire nature of the customer-seller relationship.

A conversation once dominated and driven by sales reps was wrestled back by customers who, as a result of financial pressure and an unprecedented amount of information available online, became increasingly self-educated on product options and market landscape.

Not only that, but the competition to win their business doubled.

This fact is supported by a recent  Forrester study , which forecasts the US B2B market will be worth over $10.7 trillion by 2023.

So what can we do to get ahead of the competition? What goes into an award-winning B2B sales strategy? And how can I implement it across my sales team?

We will get to that later, but first, let’s define what constitutes B2B sales.  

What is B2B sales?

B2B sales, also known as business to business sales, refer to companies or salespeople who chiefly sell products or services to other businesses rather than to consumers. 

The B2B sales process is often longer and more complex than B2C (business to consumer) as reps negotiate with large teams of decision-makers before  closing the deal .

Sales expert  Shane Gibson  suggests that decision-makers behind the bigger deals typically form a network of any of the following six key players:

• User : People using your product or service daily
• Navigator : The one who can put you in contact with the rest of the “network.”
• Ruler : Final purchase decision-maker(s)
• Protector : Safeguards the company from outside harm, often someone from legal or IT.
• Opposer : The one that makes closing the deal difficult
• Contributor : Third-party advisors, consultants, or trusted colleagues of the “Ruler.”

Selling to such a complex network is going to require a proven business to business sales strategy that uncovers a customer’s needs and puts your organization in a position to execute them.

What is the best B2B sales strategy?

Of the various B2B sales strategy examples around one which particularly stands out is the Discovery Model , a strategy proposed by sales authors Steve Andersen and Dave Stein in their book  Beyond the Sales Process . 

The Discovery Model focuses on gaining a thorough understanding of your customer’s business. Which external drivers are causing them to act? What are their business objectives? Are they facing any internal challenges? What does success look like for each individual in the network?

Achieving this level of customer understanding and alignment allows you to have conversations with your customers that competitors simply aren’t. 

Part One: Getting to Know Your Customer

The first phase of this B2B sales strategy starts with gaining a comprehensive understanding of your customer’s business.

As you begin to invest more time and effort into the discovery process, the stronger the relationship becomes, and the higher your credibility stands. 

CEO of  Top Sales World  Jonathan Farrington puts it as follows:

“Discovery allows us to demonstrate our credibility, knowledge, and commercial bandwidth – before I attempt to sell to you, I will show you that I understand your precise requirements.”

Field sales reps who demonstrate this level of understanding elevate themselves from a “ me too ” supplier position to a “ well, there’s only one option now .” They will be able to step in and offer:

• Credibility : Customers want to do business with someone they can trust and be confident they have their best interests at heart.
• A solution to the problem : Because salespeople understand the inherent needs of the customer, they can show why their product or service is a perfect fit.
• Gain a competitive edge : The better reps understand their customer’s business, the less noisy and crowded it becomes, as more in-depth conversations separate them from the competition.  

This understanding extends to each member of the B2B buyer’s network, too. Each person has a role to play and, therefore, individual goals. Knowing what they are and how to cater to their needs will go a long way in establishing credibility throughout the entire network. 

Part Two: Actionable Awareness

The ultimate goal of Andersen and Stein’s B2B sales strategy is to achieve what they refer to as actionable awareness .

Actionable awareness is, as the authors put it:

“The final stage of data filtration, refinement, and prioritization. It is where data evolves into information, and information evolves into insight at a level where sales reps and account managers can do something with it.” 

With the actionable awareness “distillation” process looking something like this:

Despite us now living in the age of “big data,” this process can be extremely challenging.

It’s easy to be misguided by the concept that all data is good data when it comes to customers. While the “more the merrier” concept applies under certain circumstances, such as initial prospection and early-phase conversation, too much data often leads to  analysis paralysis .

Field reps and managers can get so caught up in over-analyzing each tiny detail that they miss the bigger picture, and fail to offer up any actionable insight.

For example, go back to the last customer account review one of your colleagues presented.

Compare how much time they spent extrapolating points easily found on the web, versus usable data on growing the account’s value, current market share, and how they planned to strengthen the relationship moving forward.

I’d wager the former took a sizeable chunk of time from the presentation.

This isn’t to criticize account manager reviews, but rather highlight that as companies increase investments in  AI sales enablement tools , providing teams with ever-increasing quantities of data, occasionally we should take a step back to review how this data will be used.

Fortunately for us, there’s a plan to cut through the noise!

Part Three: What Does the Customer Want to Talk About?

Remember, the overall goal of this  sales strategy plan  is actionable awareness. This means salespeople need to focus on understanding what customers care about , not the product, its features, supposed benefits, and any other noise that distracts them from this goal.

Andersen and Stein broke the most common customer concerns into four groups:

External Drivers

Any outside influences that cause your customers to modify, change, or in some way, adapt their business can be considered an external driver.

The ability to uphold a conversation about one or any of these factors demonstrates your willingness to go deep into a few challenges specific to the customer’s business. 

Some examples of external drivers are:

Customer base : Their customers may be changing their buying habits, perhaps shifting over from retail to online.

Regulation : If your customer’s industry is subject to heavy regulation, either from a change in government policies or compliance rules, then this could be a potential external factor.

Shareholders : Most companies have shareholders who want results and want them now, forcing senior management to act with a sense of urgency.

Competition : Is pressure being exerted by a new competitor? Is an existing competitor releasing a new product that would make your customer’s obsolete?

Economy: Every business is at mercy to the shifting tides of the global economy, some more so than others. Perhaps your customer is particularly vulnerable to such sudden change?  

Business Objectives

This area of the conversation focuses on your customer’s planned response to the external drivers mentioned above.      

An experienced salesperson will be able to uncover which of the external drivers take priority and align the business’s response with their solution.

Typically, the customer is looking to do one of three things:

• Increase revenue . This could be through the release of a new product or service, a  customer retention campaign , raise prices on an existing offering, etc. The customer will be thinking of the return on investment (ROI) of such an action and offsetting it against any incurred costs.
• Reduce cost . This would include activities such as reducing a product’s time-to-market, increasing efficiency through the  digitization of sales processes , narrow customer focus, etc. 
• Reduce risk . Not just mitigating financial, internal, and price safety risk, but this could extend to consolidating services under a single supplier. It is, therefore, a salesperson’s job to show customers that their product or service is significantly less “risky” than any of the alternatives.

Ultimately, salespeople will want to help customers improve all three of the above if possible, and the more trustworthy and credible they become, the less risk a customer perceives of entering business with them.

Internal Challenges

This step is about understanding if any internal barriers stop a customer from achieving any of their above objectives. 

Is there an “ opposer ” within the buyer’s network? If trying to integrate a new software plug-in, is the IT team blocking its installation? Or perhaps there is an issue with the manufacturing process stopping them from ramping up production?

Whatever the case may be, it is hugely advantageous for salespeople to uncover these internal challenges. Even if not in a position to directly influence a positive outcome, reps will, at the very least, understand a customer’s train of thought when approaching certain subjects.

If there is indeed an opposer within the B2B buyer’s network, try and find out the reasons behind their objections. 

Appease to their concerns with a calm, positive attitude. That way, if their objections are purely emotional, they’ll be forced to counter you with logical, business-first arguments. 

Success Criteria

What does success look like in your customer’s eyes? Not just at an organizational level, but at a personal level, too.

As we’ve already touched upon, most B2B sales strategies require dealing with a network of people, rather than a single entity. 

Each member will have a departmental objective that filters into the overall corporate agenda, or “bigger picture” goal. The more salespeople interact with different members of the committee, the better they’ll understand what’s at stake for them individually.

This, of course, takes time. If the sales rep isn’t introduced to all key members of the B2B buyer’s network, it’s highly unlikely they’ll be receptive to such a direct question. However, once they establish a healthy relationship, salespeople will need to understand what individual success looks like for each key member.

If they can arrive at that level of understanding, it puts them in a commanding position. 

Connecting their company’s business solutions to individual department-line objectives puts a significant degree of separation between themselves and the competition.

Part Four: Open, Closed and Leading Questions

Unless you are fortunate enough to be presented with a guide to all your customer’s pain points, wants, and needs, like the rest of us, you will have to do a little digging.

The best way to do this is by asking questions. 

As Stein and Andersen point out, however, most field-based reps ask overly technical questions of their customers. 

Due to the high levels of product training they receive, this is normal, but the issue is they often lose sight of the value these products offer the customer.

And it’s this value that customers are searching for. They are looking for how your proposal can bring them closer to their needs and requirements as an organization.

To engage in a meaningful conversation with a prospective customer, salespeople need to ask a combination of open-ended, closed, and leading questions – just as they would in a day-to-day conversation with their partner.

So, what is the difference between open-ended, closed, leading questions?

• Open-ended questions are those that require more than a one-word answer.
• Closed questions are answered with a simple yes, or no.
• Leading questions prompt or encourage a specific answer.

You can find some sales-specific examples below:

It’s important to understand that this more than a simple exchange of data. It’s an opportunity for sales reps to gain insight and knowledge about a customer’s needs. Without this knowledge, it is impossible to align a solution with their business.      

So to tie it all together, the Discovery Model B2B sales strategy is all about getting a real feeling for the customer’s business. What are their external drivers for change, their objectives, internal barriers, and long-term vision for success? To achieve that, salespeople need to ask a variety of questions appropriate to the individual members of the B2B buyer’s network.

Done correctly and with a little time and patience, you’ll soon find yourself dealing in a less crowded, more collaborative space with your customers. 

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• 1 What is B2B Sales?
• 2 B2B Sales Principles
• 3 B2B Sales Strategy and Tips
• 4 Conclusion

Automate & personalize your outreach to scale and convert more.

Cold Emailing

Go-to Guide on B2B Sales Strategy For Growing Teams

Selling products or services to businesses and professionals can be tough. Most businesses are built and operated differently, which means each of them will have unique challenges to solve and corresponding needs from your product. Which is unlike selling to consumers, who have common needs and wants. 

Having a sales process in place that caters to every businesses’ needs can be crucial to hitting revenue goals consistently, and driving growth. Which is why you need a well thought out B2B Sales strategy in place. 

The right B2B sales strategy optimizes your sales process around a few key principles, all of  which allow you to make the most out of B2B selling efforts.

And throughout this guide, we’ll detail these principles, and lay out strategies following those principles that’ll help you learn how to sell B2B services and build a high yielding sales process.

But let’s start with the basics – by understanding B2B sales, what it is today, and what does the process look like?

What is B2B Sales?

B2B(Short for Business to Business) sales is a function of B2B product sales(i.e. selling products to other businesses). So if your product or service caters to a business – the process of distributing and selling your product would make up for B2B sales. 

B2B sales involves selling to multiple decision makers and users within an account, higher tickets and pricing, and a longer sales cycle, depending on what you’re selling and who you’re selling it to.

Today, B2B buyers have more resources than ever to procure products and services globally, thanks to the increase in adoption of the internet and ease in international trade and imports. 

Based on how common a business need is(read: TAM/Total Addressable Market), there are plenty of options for businesses to choose from to buy. This makes the sales process tricky for both buyers and salespeople – since buyers need to ensure they’re making the right choice, and sellers need to capture buyers’ attention and nurture them better.

In the next section, we’ll outline B2B sales principles that optimize your sales process to help you sell more, while making it easier for your leads to buy from you.

B2B Sales Principles

Generate quality leads predictably.

Your sales function requires a certain volume of B2B Sales leads to pursue periodically, so a fraction of them can convert and buy from you towards the end. This is true for both outbound and inbound sales. Now say if you were to generate lower volume of leads for the current quarter – this would mean you now have to nurture lesser leads, and as a result, convert lesser of them. Not being able to convert enough leads could have varying levels of impact, based on your sales model(one-time/recurring), but either way, growth occurs only when you’re converting enough new leads every month.

To convert and sell to new leads and generate new sales consistently, build lead generation processes that churn out leads predictably. This would mean you can generate a constant flow of leads, every month, or quarter. By doing so you’ll keep your sales team well fed with the leads they need to nurture, so they can hit their revenue goals. Also make it a point to qualify your lead well – based on your ICP(Ideal Customer Profile). Leads that don’t fit your ICP and are irrelevant, won’t convert, and would contribute towards your revenue goals meaningfully. Qualified leads convert better, and produce better out of your sales efforts. 

Know your customer

As mentioned earlier, B2B leads have unique needs per their business. So when they go out shopping for solutions, they’ll heavily lean towards products that are positioned towards their problems and challenges. Unless you know your leads and their business really well, you’ll find it difficult to communicate and relate with your leads.

By taking out the time to know each of your leads, you’ll be able to draw out their needs better, and position your products’ features and offerings to appeal to those needs. Nurturing your leads with content that sticks with them better and has a better impact on the decision makers consequently generates more conversions. Approaches like “B2B” Account Based Marketing and Account Sales work on this principle – and bring in great results, when paired with a pipeline of qualified leads.

Be helpfully persistent

As a salesperson, you realize more often than not, you’re getting ghosted by your leads as they stop responding to your outreach. There’s a few reasons for this behavior – some of which might include the fact that your leads might be too busy to get back, your message isn’t relevant or impactful enough, or your lead simply isn’t interested or motivated enough. A lot of salespeople also tend to hold back fearing becoming an annoyance to their leads, which is a well founded concern given the amount of irrelevant outreach professionals tend to get. 

When it comes to engaging leads meaningfully, ensure that you’re persistent, but with the intent to be helpful. Reaching out with the objective to close in the first few messages only will work if your lead has made up their mind to buy from you. Otherwise, your leads will start ignoring your communications, just like they’ve turned blind to hundreds of other promotional messages they get every week. 

Set up a follow-up cadence, and with each step, personalize your outreach to generate more engagement around your leads’ needs and challenges. If you have a healthy, full pipeline of leads – keeping track of leads and their messages can get tricky. Hence it’s highly recommended you automate your sales outreach and follow-ups using sales engagement tools like Saleshandy

Engage on the right channels

Outreach makes for a huge part of the B2B sales strategy and engagement process. When you reach out to your leads in hopes to start a conversation around their needs and challenges, it’s important to do so over the right communication mediums. Engaging with leads on mediums where they don’t necessarily expect to make those conversations can be counterintuitive, or ineffective at best. For example – Facebook, or SMS/Texts are great places to make cold approaches, as your leads least expect it there, and not in a good way.

When reaching out to leads, especially via online/virtual channels, focus on channels where your leads are actively participating in your areas of interest. This could include conversations around the problems you solve, or your target market in general. Emails are also a great channel – if you can find and verify your lead’s professional email address, that is. Personal emails wouldn’t be appropriate to be approached on, and sending emails on unverified emails might trigger spam filters and get your email address blacklisted. The difference in impact around picking the right channel for outreach can be drastic – think screaming at a wall vs. bumping into your lead on the street.

Sell Trust and Credibility

When you sell big-ticket products and services, based on how competitive the market(and your product) is, trust can be a huge factor in sales. When a business procures a pricey product or service, the stakes are really high, if the product were not to meet their expectations. The potential loss is two fold – losing investment on the product, and their business suffering as they no longer have a product that was meant to help them grow. 

Which is why we often see sales cycles getting proportionally long with the ticket sizes getting higher. Deals are likely to get stretched to ensure a product fit, along with compliance and quality standards. While this can’t be completely skipped, it can definitely be made more predictable and smoother. Credible vendors – ones with existing relationships within Fortune 1000 and better companies as their clients are partners, have a much easier time converting their leads. This is an after-effect of those bigger companies already having vetted, bought or invested with you – which makes it easier for new leads to trust and buy from you. So if you do have a customer base of bigger corporations and institutions your leads might look up to, leverage those relationships to influence your leads into closing. 

Have a foolproof sales process

A sales process should be at the heart of your B2B Sales Strategy, as it helps you scale your B2B sales operations and generate conversions. Sales isn’t a single person function, and requires collaborative efforts towards qualifying and engaging prospects and leads. Without a process, it’d get difficult to track and organize tasks around outreach, nurturing and closing with multiple salespeople in your team. A sales team devoid of a B2B sales process is like a cargo ship navigating without a compass or a GPS. 

To build and operate a high-performing sales function, set up a process around your revenue goals, along with the tasks that need to be done to hit them. This helps in distributing responsibilities, tracking the status of deliverables, and forecasting outcomes based on the results generated from those deliverables. 

Now that we’ve looked at the governing principles for B2B Sales strategies, let’s explore actionable sales strategies derived from these principles.

B2B Sales Strategy and Tips

Attract and nurture your ideal customers.

As we discussed the importance of generating quality leads – attracting leads that match your ICP is a crucial step in that direction. Once you’ve finalized your ICP, reverse work to narrow down the channels you could find and attract them from. This includes your own marketing assets and content(blogs, social media handles, website, etc) and your outreach and messaging. Get answers to questions like “What would a lead with X/Y/Z characteristic think/want/see/believe?”, “Where would they spend time?”, “What motivates them?”, etc. 

Use insights from this data to frame messaging and content to your ideal customers and leads, on the channels they’re active on. These channels can include platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, Podcasts, Webinars, Emails, and so on. Also, having your content localized in other languages we’ll help attract multilingual audiences.

Automate Qualification and outreach

Part of the reason behind sales operations being complex and unorganized happens to be the recurring and time sensitive nature of tasks. This includes lead data enrichment, qualification, outreach and follow-ups to leads who’re in the initial stages of the sales cycle. One way to fix this is to automate all or part of these tasks using software and sales engagement tools . By doing so, you’ll free up time for your salespeople to engage with leads and focus on the creative, non-repetitive tasks nature of their role. Automations also allow you to be more persistent that you would’ve been if you were to send your outreach and follow-ups manually, making your sales engagement process generate more yields, efficiently.

Follow-up timely and consistently

Once you’ve established a connection with your leads, your outreach efforts won’t really end. During the deal cycle at times there are actionables on the lead’s end(for eg., gathering technical requirements, making introductions, etc.). And during these stages, leads will often make delays and halt your deals or stretch your cycle. This is caused by their bias against action and lack of time. 

Which is why you should make follow-ups part of your B2B sales strategy. 96% of sales closes come on after the 5th follow-up. Hence follow-ups can dictate your sales success, based on your timing and persistence. Sales follow-ups can be tricky to keep up with. Typical B2B sales teams have multiple pipelines and several stages across them. Make sure you’ve set up a follow-up cadence for every lead once you’ve connected with them. Automating your follow-up sequences enables you to execute follow-up cadences timely. It does this without the effort and time commitment involved in manual follow-ups.

Leverage social channels for engagement

Often times, your leads wouldn’t find the time or urgency to get back to your outreach and follow-ups. Which is where you can look up your leads’ activity on social platforms where they’re likely to be spending time. Social media platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn are geared towards keeping users engaged. So any new activity on likes and comments are likely to get your prospects push notifications. This can help in capturing their attention when you need to re-engage your leads . Now that you have re-engaged your lead, you can get the deal back on track towards the next stage. 

Based on which platforms your leads are active on(Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) – follow, like and comment on their profile and posts. And when engage back, use it as an opportunity to continue the conversation through your original channel(email, for example). Using Social media for selling would make for a much better way to re-engage your leads, instead of just sending an excessive amount of emails.

Find and engage decision makers

Another cause for delayed or slowing deal cycles involves connecting and engaging with the wrong prospects within your target accounts. Your prospects might not have the authority to make purchase and procurement decisions. Hence they are less likely to respond and comply with requests to move the deal forward towards later stages. Salespeople take this as a signal of the product not being a fit/lack of need. And this can lead to lost opportunities, when in reality, they were just talking to the wrong person.

Hence whenever you notice lack of urgency or commitment from your prospects – don’t let go of the deal yet. Keep exploring options that could potentially take the deal forward, and connect with multiple stakeholders within your target account. Figure out who the decision maker would be for your deal. Ask questions like “Who does Finance consult with for making such purchases?”, “Who leads the team is responsible for the team’s deliverables?”, etc.These questions will help you find people who can influence and approve a deal, and spend more time nurturing them.

Use social proof

Vetting and evaluating B2B products and services can be confusing for your prospects who’re trying to buy from you. They need to justify their ask to the management, and ensure the product is a fit as per the company’s expectations and standards. Which is where social proof of your product being credible can be of great help. Credibility in B2B sales can be expressed in various forms. Enterprise compliance certifications, having popular corporations and startups as clients, testimonials, are some examples.

Make social proof part of your marketing and sales content. Use client testimonials, logos of prominent clients, awards and rankings, etc. These content pieces make your product and company stand out, be authoritative and hence look credible. And as a result, your prospects find it easier to trust and vet you. This speeds up the sales process, and helps improve conversions.

Set timelines for deal milestones

The goal of your sales outreach and corresponding strategies is converting a lead into a prospect and eventually, a customer. Your leads might get talking and show interest towards your product initially. But it can often be challenging to get them to commit. As mentioned earlier, this could be due to lack of authority or urgency. Common occurrences of this phenomenon could cause the sales cycle to slow down , and convert less, which isn’t ideal for your sales and revenue goals.

In order to keep the deal on track, set timelines for these deals and communicate the same with your prospects. This instills a sense of urgency in them, and pushes them to act on deliverables and requirements. Setting these timelines also helps you guide the deal and the prospect towards closure on time, and avoid unnecessary delays. 

Up-sell and cross sell to existing customers

Generating new leads and reaching out to them might seem easy in the beginning – things change as your company grows. Over time, you’ll find it difficult to generate the same volume of qualified leads as you did earlier. Either that, or your Customer acquisition costs(CAC) will rise. When this happens, leverage your list of existing customers and leads to cross sell, and pitch them new products. If you have loyal customers, you can also upsell them, i.e. sell them more of what they’ve already bought

Your existing customers or leads are already qualified. Re-engaging them pitching related products and services they might need is likely to generate more conversions. Use existing lists of customers and leads, and re-introduce them to your pipeline based on their past engagements. This helps in reducing your CAC, and increasing your LTV(Lifetime Value).

Track conversions and Yields

When operating a sales team running outreach and nurture campaigns – it’s easy to lose track of productivity and outcomes. Salespeople might be working on multiple projects and accounts, which makes it difficult to draw lines on each members’ contributions. While this might not seem like a lot – it impacts your team’s ability to improvise and enhance your sales process.

Within your sales engagement tools and CRMs, set up ways to track activity and conversions of your sales outreach. Record metrics like open and click rates, page session times, open to connect ratio, etc. Tracking these metrics allows you to keep an eye on your sales outreach performance. Over time, you can improve your yield and generate more revenue by tweaking your processes to grow these metrics.

At the heart of every B2B sales strategy within the best performing sales teams, lies a well oiled sales machine. Such systems and processes generate predictable sales revenue. Every B2B sales business plan and principle hinges on consistent volume and quality of leads. A solid sales process avoid leads leaking out of your pipeline, and optimizes conversions. 

This doesn’t exempt you from having a subpar product or service. Early growth comes from having a great product, and scales when you add distribution and marketing to the mix. When you generate long term value for your existing customers through upsells and cross sells, it boosts your LTV. Higher LTV helps you grow quicker, without leaning on new leads for generating new sales.

In conclusion – your B2B sales strategy essentially has to be a mix of nailing Product market fit and scaling distribution. Strategies for these combined with sales processes then help convert the demand into revenue. As you build these processes, also add mechanisms to track performance metrics, and optimize those metrics for growth and yield. This will help you accomplish your goal with your B2B sales strategy – generate predictable revenue as per your sales goals, and grow sustainably.

Have you come across any of these strategies before? Did any of the listed strategies help you generate desired results? Let us know in comments.

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How to build a successful b2b sales strategy the ultimate guide.

About the author

Jill Romford

Dec 15,2023 - Last update: Dec 15,2023

In certain life scenarios, acting on a whim can be rewarding. However, understanding how to build a successful B2B sales strategy is crucial, as this approach isn't applicable to B2B sales. 

The complexity of B2B transactions is notable. Risks are significant, the process of making a sale is protracted, finding leads is often a strenuous task, and handling multiple stakeholders during the closing phase adds to the challenge. A robust strategy, executed precisely, is indispensable for triumph in B2B sales .

Clients in the B2B sphere are exacting, having a clear vision of their requirements, and setting lofty standards for their suppliers. An overwhelming majority , over 70%, of these buyers already have a firm idea of their needs prior to initiating discussions with sales representatives. 

Therefore, reserve impulsive decisions for leisure activities. 

When pondering how to build a successful B2B sales strategy , remember that engaging with B2B clients demands a meticulously crafted, reliable strategy.  

What is B2B sales?

  Business-to-business (B2B) sales refer to transactions conducted between two businesses, as opposed to those involving a business and an individual consumer for personal use. In the realm of B2B sales, several distinctive features set them apart. 

These transactions typically involve larger amounts, necessitate more informed buyers, follow a multistakeholder approval process, and consequently, entail a more prolonged sales cycle.

In a B2B context, the dynamics are shaped by the unique demands and intricacies of business interactions, fostering a strategic and collaborative approach to meet the needs of both parties involved. 

The complexity of B2B sales underscores the importance of building strong relationships, understanding the intricacies of the products or services involved, and navigating the nuanced decision-making processes within organizations.

As businesses continue to evolve, the landscape of B2B sales also experiences shifts driven by advancements in technology, changes in market dynamics, and evolving customer expectations. 

To succeed in the B2B space, organizations must stay agile, adapt to emerging trends, and leverage innovative strategies to engage with their business counterparts effectively. 

The ongoing evolution of B2B sales presents both challenges and opportunities, requiring a dynamic and forward-thinking approach to navigate this ever-changing landscape.

Check out: Top 6 AI-Powered Project Management Tools To Use In 2023 ​

B2B Sales Examples

In the realm of B2B sales, here are some b2b sales examples; the key focus lies in understanding the target audience rather than the specific sales approach. 

The distinctive characteristics of B2B transactions, such as higher price points, extended sales cycles, and a strong emphasis on relationship-building, significantly influence the overall B2B sales process.

​ Examples of elements encompassed in B2B sales include:

• ​ Targeted Clientele: Identifying and engaging with specific businesses, industries, or niches that align with the product or service offerings.
• Strategic Pricing: Determining price points that reflect the value proposition, taking into account the complexities and unique needs of the business clientele.
• Consultative Selling: Adopting a consultative approach that involves understanding the client's business, providing tailored solutions, and building long-term relationships.
• Customized Solutions: Offering products or services that are tailored to meet the specific requirements and challenges faced by business clients.
• Negotiation and Contractual Agreements: Navigating intricate negotiations and formalizing agreements through contracts that address the complexities of B2B relationships.
• Account Management: Providing ongoing support and maintaining relationships post-sale to ensure client satisfaction and foster potential future collaborations.
• Multi-Stakeholder Decision-Making: Recognizing and navigating the involvement of various decision-makers within the client organization, often requiring alignment with different departments.
• Lead Generation and Prospecting: Implementing targeted strategies to identify and approach potential B2B clients, recognizing the importance of quality leads.

By delving into these aspects, businesses can refine their B2B sales strategies, adapt to the unique dynamics of the business landscape, and ultimately foster successful and enduring partnerships.

What is a Sales Strategy, and Why Do You Need One? 

The essence of a sales strategy is a well-defined plan that a business employs to increase revenue. 

This is achieved by informing potential clients about their offerings and subsequently persuading them to make a purchase. An ideal strategy is one that can be replicated consistently, ensuring continuous sales with new customers.

While sales and marketing are most effective when aligned, they are fundamentally distinct. Marketing revolves around raising awareness of your products amongst potential buyers. In contrast, a sales strategy focuses on convincing a specific customer to invest in your products.

A thoroughly tested and refined B2B sales strategy empowers you to:

• Accurately pinpoint your ideal customer base
• Assertively highlight the unique benefits of your products
• Engage with prospective clients via the most impactful sales channels
• Execute sales presentations that effectively conclude transactions

The subsequent ten steps are designed to guide you towards achieving these objectives.  

How to build a successful b2b sales strategy example

We have compiled a B2B sales strategy example tailored for small and medium-sized businesses below.

Business Profile: A tech enterprise specializing in cloud-based marketing automation solutions.

Target Audience: Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) seeking enhanced marketing efficiency and effectiveness.

Sales Approach:

• Targeted Prospecting: Identify and focus on SMBs actively seeking marketing automation solutions. Utilize diverse methods, including participation in industry events, engagement in online communities, and leveraging marketing automation software for lead identification.
• Nurturing Relationships: Cultivate connections with potential clients by delivering valuable content, such as webinars, white papers, and case studies. Engage with them on social media platforms and promptly respond to inquiries.
• Value-Based Selling: Emphasize the benefits of the software, not just its features. Assist potential clients in understanding how the solution addresses their specific marketing challenges and enhances overall business outcomes.
• Social Proof: Showcase the success of the software through testimonials and case studies involving other SMBs.
• Case Studies: Develop compelling case studies highlighting how the software has aided other SMBs in achieving their marketing objectives.
• Demonstrations: Offer potential clients software demonstrations to illustrate its capabilities and how it can address their specific needs.
• Free Trials: Provide free trials to enable potential clients to experience the software's value firsthand.
• MQL to SQL Funnel: Establish a clear process for converting Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) into Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs), ensuring that only the most qualified leads are handed over to the sales team.
• Sales Automation: Implement sales automation tools to streamline the sales process and boost efficiency.

Why is B2B Sales Strategy important?

An effective B2B strategy forms the foundation of contemporary B2B sales, which presents unique challenges not encountered by sales professionals in the past. These challenges include:

• Contemporary buyers are inundated with advertising and marketing messages from numerous companies constantly.
• Modern buyers often approach ads and marketing promises with a level of skepticism, recognizing them as potential tactics to influence purchasing decisions.
• The internet provides a platform for comprehensive reviews on virtually any product or service.
• Prospective customers are inclined to research and seek reviews before making decisions on whether to engage with your product or service.
• B2B products and services often involve significant financial commitments.
• Companies, being mindful of their budgets, may take more time in the decision-making process, carefully weighing the risks associated with the investment.

Addressing these challenges requires a dynamic and evolving sales strategy. This strategy serves not only as a playbook outlining effective sales approaches but also as a tool that can be adapted as your team encounters obstacles and bottlenecks. 

By continuously refining your sales strategy, you ensure that your team is equipped with a set of best practices to navigate sales pitches successfully when engaging potential buyers.  

10 Steps to a Successful B2B Sales Strategy

​ Searching for ideas to develop your B2B sales strategy? 

Explore these ten approaches to enhance your sales strategy and increase your chances of successfully closing deals.

1. Choose What Kind of Strategy You Need 

Opting for a generic strategy is less effective than crafting one tailored to your unique business context and needs. Your sales strategy's framework should align with your objectives, which may include:

• Cultivating new leads
• Converting these leads into clients
• Encouraging repeat purchases from existing customers

Recognizing these goals is the first step in developing strategies that are specifically suited to achieving them.  

For assistance in setting goals, utilize the SMART system, characterized by the following elements:

• Specific: Clearly defined and precise.
• Measurable: Objectives that can be quantified and tracked.
• Attainable: Goals that are realistically achievable.
• Relevant: Aligned with your overall purpose and objectives.
• Time-based: Set within a specific timeframe for completion.

2. Determine If Your Strategy is Inbound or Outbound 

Consider the contrast between an upscale nightclub and a door-to-door salesperson. Both are employing sales strategies, yet their methods are distinctly different.

The nightclub exemplifies an inbound sales strategy. Their marketing is designed to pique the interest of their target demographic and draw them in. Conversely, the salesperson's door-to-door approach is a classic example of an outbound sales strategy.

Choosing between inbound and outbound strategies hinges on your market position and specific business challenges. Inbound is effective when your audience is already seeking the solutions you offer. 

For innovative or disruptive products, outbound tactics can introduce and advocate for your solution to issues your potential customers might be unaware of. 

While some enterprises might adopt a hybrid approach, the subsequent steps in your strategy will significantly differ based on your chosen direction.  

3. Get Sales and Marketing Working Together 

Dispense with any notion of rivalry between sales and marketing teams, these departments must function in unison, interweaving their expertise. Through their interactions, sales professionals gain insights about customer challenges and desired product features. 

These insights are invaluable for marketing, enabling them to tailor their strategies effectively. In reciprocity, marketing's role in identifying high-potential leads and providing sales with the necessary tools and materials is indispensable. 

This symbiosis ensures a comprehensive understanding of the market and customer needs.

Your organization is primed for account-based marketing (ABM) when sales and marketing align. ABM approaches each customer account as a unique market. 

It requires a bespoke strategy involving personalized messaging and content tailored to each client's specific needs and preferences. This approach, while demanding in terms of resources, is acknowledged by over 80% of marketers as highly effective, delivering a superior return on investment compared to traditional methods. 

Such a strategy is pivotal in today's competitive market, enabling a nuanced and focused approach to client engagement, leading to enhanced customer satisfaction and loyalty.  

4. Research Your Target Customers

A thorough familiarity with potential clients' businesses is essential for successful interactions in business-to-business sales. Investigating their objectives, difficulties, competitive environment, routine processes, and decision-makers is crucial. 

Detailed buyer personas, made possible by this exhaustive investigation, are a priceless asset for your sales staff. These personas go from abstract ideas into useful tools that may improve your sales presentations by incorporating information from current customers and their experiences.

In addition, the scope of this study goes beyond only locating prospective customers. In order to make better use of your resources, it is essential to identify which prospects may not be a good fit for your services. 

You may save time and energy by concentrating on leads that are more likely to convert rather than those who are less likely to engage. 

By optimizing your sales efforts and results, this strategic selection method simplifies the sales cycle and boosts the chance of successful transactions.

5. Identify Your Leads, Qualify, and Nurture Them

Using dynamic marketing campaigns or direct contact via your sales staff is frequently necessary to uncover good leads in B2B sales. 

Thoroughly qualifying these leads is a crucial part of this procedure. To do this, you need to compare each lead based on certain factors, such as the size of the firm, how well they match your target buyer profile, and how long they are expected to take to make a purchase. 

In order to focus your sales efforts on the most promising prospects, it is crucial to implement a scoring system. 

This will help you prioritize leads effectively.

It is critical to recognise the usually lengthy sales cycles in the context of business-to-business sales. While not all leads are ready to buy right now, there is still a good chance that some of them will be in the future. 

Finding out where each lead is in your sales funnel is crucial. Now that you know where they are in the purchase process, you can personalise your interaction by giving them material that is relevant and interesting to them. Their curiosity is maintained and they are guided towards a purchasing choice more easily with this deliberate nurturing.

In addition, by using this method, we may have a deeper grasp of the specific preferences and demands of each lead. 

You can earn their confidence and develop your brand as an expert and trustworthy companion by providing them with information and solutions that speak to their unique decision-making journey stage. One of the most important ways to turn leads into loyal clients is to develop trust. 

Another way to make your plan more successful over time is to constantly analyze lead reactions and interactions and adjust your strategy accordingly.

6. Determine Key Activities

This stage transitions your strategy from conceptualization to practical application. 

Concentrate on these three crucial areas:

• Social Media - Potential buyers will investigate your digital footprint before purchasing. Ensure your social media channels showcase quality media, useful resources, detailed product information, and prompt responses to any customer engagement.
• Understanding the Buyer's Journey - B2B purchase decisions evolve over time. Recognize the differing inquiries buyers have at various stages, from initial solution exploration to final decision-making. By comprehending their decision-making trajectory, you can effectively guide them through the sales funnel by providing timely and relevant information.
• Building Customer Relationships - B2B sales often involve prolonged engagement rather than one-time transactions. Investing time in cultivating relationships not only ensures a good fit between your offerings and the customer's needs but also fosters satisfaction and referrals. Efforts to build trust and authority will bolster your reputation, even if a lead does not culminate in a sale.

7. Create Valuable Content

  In the B2B landscape, a significant number of buyers exhibit a preference for undertaking their research rather than simply listening to sales pitches. 

The secret to engaging such buyers effectively is the provision of thorough, enlightening content that speaks directly to their needs and offers real, tangible value. 

This approach is crucial in establishing credibility and trust with prospective clients.

Content that remains perennially relevant, such as ebooks, whitepapers, and product demonstrations, forms a vital part of this strategy. 

However, the true power of content marketing in the B2B sphere is unlocked when it is tailored to the specific needs and interests of your target audience. By leveraging detailed customer data and insights gained from understanding their purchasing journey, you can craft content that resonates more deeply with each potential buyer. 

This personalization makes your content not only informative but also highly relevant to each individual buyer's context.

Customized content has the potential to address specific challenges or questions that buyers might have, thereby positioning your brand as a thought leader and trusted advisor in your industry. 

This approach is particularly effective in a landscape where buyers are inundated with generic marketing messages. By differentiating your content and making it more relevant to the unique needs of your buyers, you significantly enhance the chances of your content leading to meaningful engagements and, ultimately, conversions.

Moreover, this strategy of creating tailored content allows for a more dynamic interaction with your audience. It opens up opportunities for feedback and further engagement, enabling you to refine your understanding of customer needs and preferences continuously. 

This ongoing interaction not only helps in building stronger relationships but also ensures that your content remains aligned with the evolving landscape of customer demands and industry trends.

8. Get the Right Tools for the Job

Equipping your team with the appropriate software tools is essential to fully harness the potential of your sales in a digital landscape. Key tools include:

A CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system for capturing lead information, organizing customer data, and automating sales outreach.

Analytics and reporting tools for deriving insights from your CRM data and assessing sales performance.

Social media management tools for overseeing your accounts, tuning into relevant social discussions, and scheduling posts.

Attribution-based Content personalization tools allow you to track lead sources, map customer journeys, and deliver tailored content.

The more these tools can integrate and automate, the more streamlined your sales process becomes.

9. Get a Team and a Plan

While a sales strategy forms the foundation, it only transitions from theory to practice when executed by a proficient sales team. 

This team must not only have a deep understanding of your product but also be armed with the insights derived from thorough market research. These insights are crucial for tailoring their approach to meet the specific needs and expectations of your target audience.

To operationalize this strategy, start by delineating a clear and concise sales process. 

This should consist of specific, repeatable actions that your team will consistently follow to implement the strategy effectively. Having a structured process in place ensures that every team member understands their role and the steps necessary to achieve the desired outcomes.

Next, formulate a detailed action plan. This plan should break down the strategy into actionable tasks, assigning clear responsibilities to each team member. 

This step is critical for ensuring accountability and tracking progress against your strategy.

10. Measure and Adjust

The success of your B2B sales strategy is contingent on the metrics you use to define your goals. 

The final step is vigilant monitoring of your strategy's performance, regularly measuring its effectiveness, and making necessary adjustments. 

If certain tactics or activities are not yielding desired results, be prepared to switch to alternative methods. This iterative approach ensures continual improvement and adaptation of your sales strategy.

Wrapping up on  How to Build a Successful B2B Sales Strategy  

Grasping the nuances of your market, comprehending your customer base, and clearly defining your objectives are crucial steps in crafting an effective B2B sales strategy that leads to conversions. To maximize the efficacy of your strategy, continual refinement is necessary. 

This involves a process of experimentation, leveraging insights gained through experience, and employing top-notch software tools.

Navigating the complexities of B2B sales can seem daunting, yet it need not be an insurmountable challenge. An adept sales strategy empowers you to engage with your customers precisely where they are, providing them with the necessary information to make informed purchasing decisions with confidence.

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B2B Sales: Strategy, Examples and 12 Best Practices

B2B sales means selling products or services to other businesses, not to individual consumers. In this type of sales, things are more complicated. It takes longer to complete a sale, and the amount of money involved is usually higher than in sales to individual customers.

Understanding B2B Customers

Knowing your customers is a critical component of successful B2B sales. Here’s an overview of key aspects to consider:

• Target Market: Know who your ideal customers are. Determine the industries, company sizes, and types of businesses that would benefit most.
• Customer Needs: To succeed in B2B sales, you need to know your customers’ challenges, goals, and problems. This understanding allows you to tailor your sales approach and solutions effectively.
• Decision-Making Process: B2B purchasing decisions often involve multiple stakeholders. To understand this process, know the decision-makers, influencers, and what matters most to them.
• Buyer Persona: A detailed buyer personas can help in understanding your typical customers. This should mention the job, industry problems, goals, and desired solutions.
• Customer Feedback: Regularly collect and analyze feedback from your customers. This feedback is very important. It helps us understand their experiences with our product or service. It also tells us what improvements we can make.
• Market Trends: Stay informed about trends and changes in the industries you serve. This knowledge helps in anticipating customer needs and adapting your offerings accordingly.

Making a sale is important, but so is building trust and creating value. It’s about establishing a partnership that benefits both parties for a long time.

The B2B Sales Process

Breaking down the B2B sales process into steps clarifies how to close a sale in a business-to-business context. 

This breakdown provides a general framework for navigating the B2B sales process .  The steps can change based on the industry, product complexity, and business model.  To complete each step, you need certain skills and strategies. 

1. Prospecting

To start, find potential customers (leads) who may want your product or service. You can do this in many ways, such as networking, referrals, cold calling, email campaigns, and social media outreach.

2. Qualifying Leads

After making a list of potential customers, you need to qualify leads and assess their suitability. To see if a customer needs your product, check their budget, decision-making power, and purchase timeline.

3. Needs Assessment

Engage with the qualified leads to understand their specific needs, challenges, and goals. This step usually includes detailed discussions or meetings. You need good listening and questioning skills to understand how your product can solve their problems.

4. Developing a Solution

Once you have all the information about what they need, make a solution or proposal just for their challenges.

5. Presentation or Proposal

Present your company and solution to the decision-makers. This could be in the form of a formal presentation, a detailed proposal, or a product demonstration. The key is to articulate the benefits and ROI of your solution.

6. Handling Objections

After presenting your solution, prospects may have sales objections or concerns. To handle these issues, give more details, assurances, or adjust your proposal accordingly.

7. Closing the Sale / Deal

After addressing objections and satisfying the prospect, proceed to finalizing the sale. To complete the process, we need to finalize the terms, sign contracts, and prepare for delivery or implementation.

8. Post-Sale Relationship Management

After you make a sale, keep in touch with the customer to make sure they are happy and build a lasting relationship. To keep customers coming back and referring others, it’s important to take this step. It helps build a loyal network.

B2B Sales Strategies

Business-to-business sales use different strategies to engage with clients and close deals. The strategies used depend on the product or service, sales cycle, and target market.

Each of these strategies can be effective depending on the context and goals of the sales effort. Here are some common B2B sales strategies :

Solution Selling

This approach helps solve a problem that a potential client has. Sales representatives present their products or services as the answer to these problems. They focus on the advantages and results, not just the features.

Consultative Selling

In consultative sales the salesperson acts like a consultant. First, they learn about the customer’s business, challenges, and needs. Then, they suggest solutions that meet these requirements, tailoring their offerings.

Account-Based Selling (ABS)

ABS involves targeting high-value accounts or companies rather than individual leads. The sales, marketing, and customer service teams need to work together. They will create personalized buying experiences for every account.

Value-Based

This strategy is about showing customers how the product or service will help their business. The benefits are measured in ROI, efficiency gains, revenue growth, or cost savings.

Challenger Sale

This approach teaches customers new things about their business. It tailors solutions to their needs and takes control of the sales conversation.

SPIN Selling

An acronym for Situation, Problem, Implication, Need-Payoff. SPIN selling uses specific questions to help customers understand their needs and the value of the solution.

Inbound Selling

Focuses on creating and sharing content that draws customers in. In Inbound Sales , Salespeople don’t reach out to customers. They attract leads through content marketing, SEO, and solving online problems.

Referral Selling

Using existing customers to generate new leads. We ask happy customers to recommend their business contacts, building trust and creating new opportunities.

Vertical Selling

Specializing in a specific industry or vertical market. Sales representatives become experts in the unique challenges and needs of that industry. This expertise enables them to use more effective and targeted selling strategies.

Challenges in B2B Sales

To succeed in B2B sales, it’s important to overcome challenges. Here are some typical challenges and strategies to address them:

Long Sales Cycles

B2B sales often involve lengthy decision-making processes.

Many Decision Makers

B2B purchases usually need approval from several stakeholders.

Product Differentiation

In crowded markets, it can be challenging to stand out.

Negotiation

Price is often a sticking point in B2B transactions.

Generating Qualified Leads

Finding leads that are a good fit for your product can be difficult.

Building Trust with Prospects

Trust is a critical component in B2B sales.

Customer Retention

Keeping existing customers engaged and satisfied is as important as acquiring new ones.

Aligning Sales and Marketing

Misalignment between these two functions can lead to lost opportunities.

12 Best Practices

Implementing these best practices can help B2B sales professionals build more effective, efficient, and customer-friendly sales processes, ultimately leading to increased sales success and customer loyalty.

Here are some key best practices to consider:

1. Customer-Centric Approach

Always put the customer’s needs and challenges at the center of your sales strategy. Understand their business, pain points, and how your solution can help.

2. Build Strong Relationships

Focus on building long-term relationships rather than just closing a sale. Trust is vital in B2B sales.

3. Educate and Consult

Position yourself as a knowledgeable advisor who can provide valuable insights and solutions, not just a seller of products or services.

4. Leverage Data and Analytics

Use data to gain insights into customer behavior, preferences, and needs. Analytics can help in tailoring your approach and improving decision-making.

5. Learning and Adaptation

Stay informed about industry trends, changes in customer needs, and advancements in sales technology. Be willing to adapt your strategies as needed.

6. CRM Tools

Use Customer Relationship Management tools to track interactions, manage customer information, and automate tasks to increase efficiency.

7. Personalization

Tailor your communication and solutions to the specific needs of each client. Personalization can significantly increase the effectiveness of your sales efforts.

8. Focus on Value, Not Price

Emphasize the value and ROI of your solution. Help the customer understand how your product or service can positively impact their business.

9. Collaboration Across Teams

Ensure alignment between sales, marketing, customer service, and other departments. A cohesive approach can lead to more consistent and effective customer experiences.

10. After-Sales Service

After closing a sale, continue to engage with the customer. Follow-up and excellent after-sales service are key to customer retention and referrals.

11. Professional Development 

Invest in training and development for your sales team. Continuous skill enhancement is essential in the evolving landscape of B2B sales.

12. Networking

Take part in industry events, conferences, and forums. Networking can open up new opportunities and provide valuable insights.

Case studies of B2B sales

Case studies of successful B2B sales provide valuable insights into effective sales strategies and practices. Here are three “hypothetical” examples that illustrate different aspects of successful B2B sales:

Tech Startup

A small tech startup developed an innovative cloud-based analytics tool. 

Problem:  The new company had a hard time getting noticed because big, established companies controlled the market.

Strategy : They used account-based marketing (ABM) to focus on a few big companies with personalized marketing and direct outreach.

Result : The startup secured a contract with a Fortune 500 company, leading to a significant increase in credibility and exposure in the industry.

Manufacturing Company

A mid-sized manufacturing company specializing in industrial machinery. 

Problem:  Facing stagnant growth in a competitive market.

Strategy : They changed to a consultative selling method. They try to understand their clients’ needs and give customized solutions.

Result : The company grew its market share, forming good relationships with important customers and gaining new ones.

SaaS Company

A company offering Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions for business management. 

Problem:  High competition and difficulty in differentiating their service offerings.

Strategy : The company wanted to make customers happy, hear their thoughts, and make their platform better.

Result : Their dedication to making customers happy caused more people to recommend them, which led to more sales.

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What is Sales Planning? Create a B2B Sales Plan for Success

Let’s say you’re running a software company that aims to set an ambitious yet achievable target, such as increasing sales revenue by 25% over the next year.

You begin by identifying the key market segments and customer profiles to target and focus on those that are most likely to yield the best results.

But there’s much more to it.

In this article, you’ll learn how to create a B2B sales plan for success and how to approach the undertaking in an unconventional but effective way.

What is Sales Planning?

Sales planning is a strategic process that involves setting sales objectives and developing a comprehensive plan to achieve them.

This entails forecasting potential sales, allocating resources, and creating an action plan to engage with customers and prospects. Sales planning is crucial for businesses, as it helps them anticipate and respond to market trends, ensuring they remain competitive and profitable.

Sales plan and sales planning are two essential components of a successful sales strategy. They may sound similar in terminology, but they have distinct key differences that contribute to their effectiveness in driving sales growth for any organization. They’re individually significant, but they also complement each other when fostering a prospering sales ecosystem.

A sales plan is:

• A strategic roadmap outlining the goals, objectives, and targets that a company aims to achieve within a specified time period, usually annually or quarterly.
• A document that presents the overall sales and marketing approach by identifying key performance indicators ( KPIs ), defining target customers, establishing market positioning, and setting clear revenue and growth objectives.
• A guideline for sales operations , setting the stage for the methods and tactics to be utilized in achieving the predetermined targets.
• A communication tool that aligns the efforts of the entire organization, ensuring that all departments work towards a common objective.

Sales planning, on the other hand, is an ongoing process aimed at continuously creating, refining, and executing the sales plan.

It involves conducting regular analysis, identifying growth opportunities, and reacting to market trends and conditions in real-time. Sales planning goes beyond just devising a document; it involves a series of cyclical and dynamic activities that are crucial for the successful implementation of the sales plan.

The main purpose of sales planning is to ensure that the sales cycle remains relevant, effective, and adaptable as the market evolves.

That means objectives and strategies as well as managing the sales pipeline, forecasting future sales, allocating resources, and consistently monitoring sales performance. Sales planning also involves regular reporting, analysis, and learning from sales data and customer feedback.

The Sales Planning Process

Let’s take a look at the sales planning process in action.

Step 1: Set Sales Objectives

Begin by setting objectives about revenue, market share, or other performance metrics. These sales objectives need to be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART).

This means that they should be clearly defined and specific, quantifiable and measurable, realistic and achievable, aligned with the overall business goals and strategies, and have a specific timeline for achieving them.

Step 2: Analyze Your Market

Next up, you’ll need to conduct thorough research to understand your target customers, analyze market trends, assess competition, and consider the economic and regulatory factors.

By researching your target customers, you can gain valuable insights into their needs, preferences, and behaviors, which can inform your sales and marketing strategies.

Analyzing market trends allows you to identify emerging opportunities and threats in the market, helping you stay ahead of the curve.

Assessing competition helps you understand their strengths and weaknesses, allowing you to position yourself effectively in the market. And considering economic and regulatory factors helps you understand the broader market environment in which you operate.

A pro-tip for analyzing your market is to use automation tools, such as market research software, to streamline the process and gather insights quickly and efficiently.

Step 3: Identify Sales Strategies

Sales strategies define how to reach target customers and convince them to buy your products or services, such as through direct sales, channel sales, or online sales.

In our earlier example of a software company, a channel sales strategy could be partnering with resellers or value-added resellers (VARs) to sell their products to end customers.

Alternatively, the software company may choose to use an online sales strategy by selling their products directly to customers through their website. This allows them to reach customers globally and offer a convenient, self-service buying experience.

Step 4: Determine Sales Tactics

While sales strategies define the “what,” sales tactics delineate the “how.” You’ll need to identify specific actions to take to achieve sales objectives, such as launching targeted advertising campaigns, attending trade shows, or offering promotions.

For example, a business may decide to implement a targeted advertising campaign on social media to reach a specific segment of their target market. This allows them to deliver targeted messaging to potential customers and increase brand awareness.

Offering promotions, such as discounts or free trials, can also be an effective sales tactic to encourage customers to make a purchase.

The key is to determine the most effective sales tactics that “fit” your business and target customers expectations.

Step 5: Allocate Resources

Without resources like staffing, training, technology, and marketing materials, you won't be able to implement the sales plan.

For example, a business may need to hire additional sales staff to achieve their sales objectives, or invest in training to improve the skills of their existing sales team. They may also need to invest in technology, such as customer relationship management (CRM) software or sales automation tools, to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their sales process.

It is important to consider the required budget when allocating resources to ensure that the business can afford to implement the sales plan effectively.

Step 6: Develop a Sales Forecast

Once you have these key areas of planning defined, it’s time to create a realistic forecast that considers market conditions and customer behavior to create an accurate projection of sales performance.

For example, a business may analyze market trends and customer data to estimate how much of their product or service they can sell over the next quarter or year. They may also consider factors such as changes in the economy, competitors' activities, and market demand.

Step 7: Monitor and Evaluate

Once the plan is defined and executed, you’ll need to monitor and evaluate sales performance to track how successful your overall plan has been.

This involves:

• Tracking progress against sales objectives
• Analyzing sales data
• Making adjustments to the sales plan as necessary

For example, a business may track sales data on a regular basis to identify patterns and trends, such as changes in customer behavior or shifts in market demand. Based on this analysis, they may adjust their sales strategies, tactics, or resource allocation to better align with market conditions and achieve their sales objectives.

A Different Approach to Sales Planning in B2B

The seven-step sales planning roadmap we just discussed outlines what most companies go through. So why do 67% of sales plans fail ? According to this same source, it’s because the “traditional” way of thinking about sales planning is “totally backward.”

So, instead of strategic planning, what you want to focus on is strategic thinking. If you align your team to one endpoint it’s more likely to work — and that’s because you can think from the outcome and work your way backwards.

In this “alternative” or non-traditional approach to sales planning for B2B success, we recommend one endpoint — sales targets. In this approach to sales planning, you’ll focus primarily on the aspects of the B2B sales strategy that deal with organizing prospects and coordinating the sales team.

Account segmentation and scoring

To reach sales targets, you’ll need to identify who you’re targeting — and this tells you how to prioritize your sales efforts. There are two methods to conducting this:

• Account segmentation: grouping customers based on shared characteristics, such as their size, industry, or buying habits. This allows you to tailor your sales approach to the specific needs of each customer group, resulting in a more effective and efficient sales process.
• Account scoring: Assigning a score to each account based on factors such as their potential revenue, buying history, and level of engagement with the business. This means you can focus your resources on the accounts that are most likely to generate revenue.

Sales quota planning

Next, you’ll set individual and team sales targets that are both challenging and achievable, with the goal of motivating sales representatives to perform at their best and measuring their success. By establishing clear sales targets, sales teams have a concrete goal to work towards, which helps to focus their efforts and prioritize their activities.

Additionally, quotas provide a framework for performance evaluation, allowing sales managers to measure the success of individual sales representatives and the team as a whole. This gives you the opportunity to review progress against sales targets and proactively identify areas where additional training or support is needed to ensure that the team is on track to achieve their goals.

Territory planning

Territory planning involves dividing a geographic region into smaller, more manageable areas, and then assigning each area to a specific sales representative or team. This ensures adequate coverage of your target market without overlooking potential sales opportunities.

Like account scoring and segmentation, territory planning can help sales teams remain efficient in outreach efforts, so you’re focusing on areas with the highest potential return on investment.

You’ll need to analyze data on customer demographics, buying habits, and other factors to allocate territories in a way that maximizes revenue potential.

Sales capacity planning

Alongside territory planning, sales quota planning, and account segmentation activities, you’ll also focus on assessing the necessary resources needed to achieve those targets and planning accordingly.

This can include analyzing factors such as the size of the sales team, the available budget, and the capacity of existing infrastructure and technology. By doing so, you can identify potential capacity constraints and make strategic decisions about how to allocate resources.

For example, you may choose to invest in additional sales training for their team, hire additional sales representatives, or upgrade their technology infrastructure to improve efficiency.

Effective sales capacity planning helps to ensure that sales teams have the resources they need to meet their sales targets and that the organization can scale its sales efforts as needed. And regularly monitoring sales capacity means you can adjust plans as necessary and ensure that your team is equipped to meet the demands of the market and achieve their sales goals.

Benefits of strategic sales planning

Strategic sales planning calls for a more proactive approach to sales and revenue growth, starting with a clear overview and defined goals that align with your overall business strategy. This helps to establish a strong foundation for future growth and success.

Additionally, strategic sales planning enables better predictability of sales and revenue, which can help businesses plan for the future and make data-driven decisions. By setting revenue targets and tracking progress towards them, organizations can ensure that they are on track to achieve their goals.

Effective sales planning also fosters improved collaboration between marketing and sales, enabling teams to work together to create a cohesive strategy that delivers results.

Finally, strategic sales planning can improve accountability along the pipeline, helping teams to identify areas for improvement and optimize their sales processes.

Overall, strategic sales planning is essential for any organization looking to drive steady revenue growth and establish a robust foundation for long-term growth.

B2B sales planning activities could include tactics such as advertising campaigns, product promotions, targeted email sequences, and incentives for existing clients to refer new customers.

But it all begins with a plan.

A comprehensive plan will help you allocate resources, set budgets, and compile performance metrics to monitor progress and measure success. Your aim is to align sales activities with overall business objectives to maximize your chances of achieving the desired growth. 

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How To Create A Winning B2B Sales Strategy

Table of Contents

B2B sales have evolved drastically over the years. It’s no more about just selling products to generate revenue. Now, it’s more about digging into a prospect’s problems, offering viable solutions, and fostering healthy relationships.

But even after offering great products and curating an elaborate marketing plan, your sales may take a hit. But why?

The answer is that informed customers now dominate the conversation with the sales rep. Today, customers want a comprehensive rundown on the product options available. With internet access at their fingertips, they keep themselves updated with the current market standards, competitions, and options.

• Only 29% of buyers want to talk with a sales rep before purchasing a product/service.
• 54% of buyers make their buying decision before talking to a supplier.
• Also, about 34% of the sales reps admit that closing a deal is becoming harder.

Increasing competition among companies to close the deal has led to immense pressure on the sales reps.

Does all this mean that your time as a sales rep is over?

Of course not!

A Forrester study suggests that the B2B market in the US will hit $10.7 trillion by 2023 . When so much money is pouring in, the market shows exponential growth.

But competitions grows with growing market. So, how can you scope out your competitors and win big?

The answer lies in curating a B2B sales growth strategy that addresses the relationship change and growing competition. A comprehensive B2B sales strategy with a critical focus on customers is the key to successful sales.

In this blog, you’ll get an in-depth look into the steps needed to curate a winning B2B sales strategy framework. For better understanding, there will be examples to show the strategy in action.

First, let’s understand what a B2B sales strategy is.

What is a B2B Sales Strategy?

A B2B sales strategy comprises two terms: B2B sales and strategy .

B2B sales: Business-to-business (B2B) is a sales form where a company sells products/services to another company or organization. B2B is more challenging than B2C because the sales rep has to negotiate with large teams of decision-makers. Thus, B2B sales have higher order value and longer sales cycles .

Strategy: A business strategy, as defined by Michael D. Watkins , is:

“A set of guiding principles that, when communicated and adopted in the organization, generates a desired pattern of decision making."

Summing up, we can define B2B sales strategy as:

A set of detailed steps and guidelines a business should follow to sell their products or services to the targeted buyers, which in this case, are other businesses (B2B).

The strategy should be formed in a way that conveys the real value proposition to the buyers in a concise way.

In simple words, your strategy boils down to how your product/ service will make a customer’s work better.

Why is B2B SaaS Sales Strategy Crucial?

When you have a sales strategy, your goals become concrete . A sales strategy serves as a foundation of the entire sales process.

Every sales rep will draw his or her power and vision from this strategy. Further, a sales strategy saves time by curtailing all necessary efforts wasted in chasing futile prospects or leads. It offers a blueprint of success that serves as a lighthouse for future activities .

Even in B2B SaaS, the most important thing is defining the customer/market size. The SaaS market is already competitive; a well thought-out strategy helps communicate why your product has a better value . A SaaS strategy identifies the key areas to increase user base when it comes to customer retention and acquisition.

That’s about the foundation. Now, let’s look at how to create a winning B2B sales growth strategy:

How to Create A B2B Sales Strategy?

1. Research and Define Your B2B Customers

The primary mistake that most B2B companies commit is selling to everyone.

There’s a misconception that; higher the customer base, higher the revenue. But that idea falls flat in real-life. When you’re selling to everyone, you’re selling to no-one, is a common saying in the marketing world. And that’s why more than 50% of the prospects aren’t even a fit for your product .

Invest time and effort in investigating your prospect's needs. The more understanding you develop, the stronger the relationship will become, and the higher your credibility.

As IDC puts it, “The buyer journey is nothing more than a series of questions that must be answered.”

Narrowing down your customer segment will help you be better prepared in dealing with their needs and queries. This preparedness will make your buyers more receptive to your sales pitch and more likely to close a deal.

Remember, the search for the perfect customer segment demands patience and time. And that’s okay because the market defines the company’s future. Once you have zeroed in on the right segment, create a detailed account of the buyer’s persona.

• What are their everyday problems?
• What does their world look like?
• What are the pain points they struggle with?
• Why is your product/service valuable to them?

2. Analyze the Niche Market

The market encompasses the potential buyers and competitors in your domain.

After defining your ideal customers, it’s critical to analyze the entire market ecosystem. This helps in two ways:

• It gives better insight into how to place your product.
• The sales rep can get the ground report about the available solutions and offer a better value to fit the unique needs.

For instance, if your B2B market is in the IT domain; to evaluate the market, ask yourself these questions:

• How many customers are there in your target region?
• How many in each country?
• Do you have a thousand customers in a single region or just five?
• Which competitors are already there in the market?
• What’s the future of the market? Is it growing, steady, or falling?

Once you find answers to these questions, include them in your sales plan. You can also make suggestions to the collected data based on how your market should be. This process may seem intimidating, but with AI in sales, the data gathering and evaluation become quick.

3. Craft Relevant and Compelling USP

Now you know who to sell and where to sell, the next question is, how will you bring value?

In the previous steps in the B2B sales strategy, you’ve already analyzed the competitors. It’s time to craft your value proposition. If there are products already available in the market, why would the customer buy from you ?

Ask yourself these questions:

• Which specific problems are you trying to solve?
• How do you plan to resolve their pain points?
• What combination of products or services are you offering them?
• Why are your products/ services relevant to them?
• Which problem does none of the current products solve?

Asking questions is central to developing a B2B sales growth strategy. The more you ask, the more you are able to get in the customer’s skin. Sitting in a cabin in your office doesn’t help bring new sales until you examine the ground report.

One of the most compelling ways of delivering your value proposition is storytelling.

Donald Miller, in his book Building a StoryBrand , quotes:

“The problem isn’t your product – it’s how you talk about your product.”

Even if you have a perfect product-customer fit, niche market, valuable product, your sales may get diminishing returns. Because if you fail to communicate the value, buyers will move on. Thus, include storytelling while communicating your value proposition.

“If we don’t closely analyze each element of our customers’ story, they’ll sense we don’t care and move on to a competing brand that took time to do the work.” - Donald Miller.

4. Build a Customer Relationship Strategy

The fundamental element in building a strong customer base is trust and loyalty. Sales reps are the spokesperson of a company. If buyers won’t trust a representative, how will they trust their product?

• Only 3% of the customers trust sales reps .
• About 50% of the prospects think sales reps are pushy .

In a world where everyone thinks about profit, becoming your prospect’s trusted advisor is an unfair advantage over reps that focus solely on money .

Ask these questions before finalizing this step in the B2B sales strategy:

• What type of relationship your ideal buyers are willing to maintain?
• What are the prospects’ expectations from the relationship?
• What relationships have you already established?
• How’s the relationship integrated into your business?
• What’s the cost of maintaining these relationships?

B2B Sales Strategy Example:

You can have customer relationships on a variety of levels.

Scenario 1: If you choose to have a less personal relationship, you will extend support only when needed. In this model, after you sell your services/ product, your customer has to implement it independently. But you’ll provide chat support to solve any incoming queries.

Scenario 2: Perhaps you decide to be very personal and interact with the customers at every step. You can set up a support site, or you choose to call every customer once each quarter to find out how they’re doing. You can also opt to be more practical in approach and help customers implement solutions in their business.

5. Devise an Action Blueprint

The above steps serve as a guide to build the foundation of a successful B2B sales strategy. Now, you need to craft a plan to put the strategy into action and achieve your sales goals.

This starts with figuring out the elements that have the maximum influence on your sales process. In short, these elements will be vital in your entire B2B sales strategy. For instance, OKRs, KPIs, key activities, key resources and tasks that you perform are critical in B2B sales.

Key activities: Create an activity plan and list down the critical task you’ll perform. Start figuring out:

• What key activities does this job need?
• Are these activities missing anything?
• What are the activities related to customer relationships?
• What are the activities related to marketing, product development, service teams?
• What are the activities you need to reach more potential customers?
• How will you connect these critical activities for optimum performance?

Based on the type of problem you’re solving, key activities can take different forms.

They can be a one-time task, like creating an onboarding program. Or continuous and long-term follow-up calls to schedule. Remember, assign an action point against each activity to ensure they don’t get limited to paper.

Key resources: Resources are the supply that benefit the action. In business, they propel the entire sales strategy forward. Your resources can be money, time, employees, etc. Just like with the key activities, you need to figure out what is critical.

• Are the critical resources missing?
• What should be done to utilize the resources?
• Is there a way to optimally use the resources?

For instance, while creating a sales follow-up or customer onboarding plan, you need excellent materials like guides and instructions to share with buyers. Or, you may need a competent worker to show the sales demos and present solutions.

By this stage, you’ll get a better understanding of your previous plans. Maybe the resources don't fit the elaborate strategies, and you need to re-access your key activities and market accordingly.  

6.Deploy a Sales Target

After you finish the action plan, you need to define where you’ll hit . Just laying out data and hoping it will attract more sales doesn’t work. Remember, hope is not a strategy. You need to build a sales target based on your current customers and potential buyers.

Some common issues occurring due to misalignment:

• Irrelevant KPIs to measure team’s performance.
• No central content library to assist the sales rep during his interaction with the prospects.
• Undefined leads that sales rep fails to close.

Set targets that are specific , measurable , and tangible . For instance:

• How many leads are you planning to develop in each region?
• How many deals are you planning to close in each city?
• What’s the duration granted to achieve these goals?

Create a timeline with how many times you plan to contact a buyer, frequency of follow-ups, and time to close a deal.

People Buy Solutions, Not Product

Philip Kotler says, “The best advertising comes from satisfied customers.”

B2B sales have evolved a lot in recent times. Customers are self-educating themselves before considering a product/ service. Thus, it becomes crucial to create and follow a definitive B2B sales strategy that outlines the critical KPIs , personas , activities , resources , and goals .

Remember, a successful sales strategy ignites word-of-mouth marketing.

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B2B Sales Strategy: How to Form Strategies That Win in B2B

Casey O'Connor

What Is a B2B Sales Strategy?

Why is a b2b sales strategy important, how to build a b2b sales strategy, common b2b sales strategies.

With today’s B2B decision-makers having access to more buying information than ever, they need less and less input from salespeople.

That’s why it’s imperative for sales teams to create and execute a targeted B2B sales strategy to help them consistently and predictably win new and repeat business.

In this article, we’ll go over everything you need to know about B2B sales strategies  including what they are, why you need one, and some solid starting points for creating your own.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

A B2B sales strategy is an action plan that a sales team designs and carries out in order to convert as many prospects as possible into customers. The best B2B sales strategies are often co-created by sales, marketing, and customer success teams.

The goal of a sales strategy is to empower sales reps with the mindset, resources, and action steps they need to persuade buyers from your target audience to purchase your product.

The specifics of any given sales strategy — things like the target market, the resources involved, the investments of time and/or capital required, the role marketing will play, etc. — will be unique to each individual company and team. Teams should take care to design their strategies using the most up-to-date and thoroughly researched data available.

Of course, that’s not to say that your sales strategy should ignore the needs, goals, and resources available to your own business — sales strategies are ultimately designed to benefit the teams that create them. But the most successful ones are written from the mindset of aiming to serve the customer, rather than aiming to meet quota .

With that in mind, a high-quality B2B sales strategy should be an actionable, repeatable, and scalable process; in other words, successful execution of the strategy should produce tangible, predictable impacts on your bottom line.

It’s been well-known for a while that the internet permanently changed what it means to sell products. In today’s digital world, where access to information is virtually limitless and instantaneous, buyers can easily navigate most buying decisions without any input from a sales team.

In fact, current data shows that about 52% of buyer decisions are made before ever making contact with a sales team.

Compounding this challenge is the fact that buyers today are not only more independent but also more skeptical and more fastidious — both of which have increased the length of the B2B sales cycle by 22% in the last five years .

A targeted sales strategy can mitigate these issues. It allows salespeople to design a proactive plan for meeting buyers where they are instead of waiting to react (at which point decisions have usually already been made).

A well-designed sales strategy allows your sales team to make the strongest possible case for your product’s unique selling points.

Developing and implementing a new B2B sales strategy isn’t light work — not if you want it to be successful, at least. 

Although quite a bit of effort is often involved, building a B2B sales strategy should be an intentional, thorough, and methodical process. The following considerations will help you get started. 

Market Research

As is the case with many things in sales, the first step to success is research. 

Before you sit down to build your B2B sales strategy, make sure everyone on your team has a solid understanding of the dynamics at play in the overall market.

Market trends and predictions will all have an influence on the sales process (even if it’s only a subconscious effect), so sales reps need to be intentional about keeping their finger on the pulse of what’s happening in the market. 

Value Proposition

Sales Team Training

Although sales training gets a bad reputation for being boring and even a waste of time, it’s one of the most impactful things you can offer your team — as long as you get it right. 

Sales Collateral

Sales collateral is an umbrella term that encompasses any document, content, or other resource that assists reps in the sales process and helps move leads through the sales funnel. 

Lead Generation Strategy

With nearly two-thirds of marketers and one-third of sales reps reporting lead generation as their biggest challenge, every team that’s deliberately creating a B2B sales strategy needs to take this important practice seriously, and design intentional processes to support it. 

In truth, lead generation is about a lot more than just finding enough leads to achieve your conversion rate. 

It’s okay if your lead generation strategy requires some trial and error; as with every other process in sales, it’s important to collect data on your strategies and their results, and make adjustments accordingly as you go. 

Lead Qualification

Lead qualification is another important sub-process within your B2B sales strategy, and should be well-defined and carefully planned. 

One easily standardized lead qualification model that sales and marketing use to efficiently qualify leads as they enter the pipeline is lead scoring.

Personalized Sales Outreach

Sales and Marketing Alignment

The nuts and bolts of your B2B sales strategy will outline the steps your sales team needs to take to meet their goals. However, even more important to its success than the specifics of your sales strategy is the careful alignment of your sales and marketing teams.

Teams with well-aligned sales and marketing teams enjoy: 

• 20% annual growth rate
• 38% higher sales wins
• 36% higher customer retention rate

Aligning sales and marketing also increases annual company revenue , improves brand awareness, and increases average deal size.

​ On the other hand, a sales strategy created without collaboration between these two teams is almost certain to fail. 

B2B Sales Enablement Tools

There are a number of tools in the sales enablement space that can support and improve your B2B sales strategy. The software you choose should allow all stakeholders in the sales process the ability to peek into the sales process, from the very beginning to the very end.

Here are a few of our favorites.

• Cloze : Cloze ensures alignment between board-level revenue strategy, sales strategy, and tactical execution. It helps you optimize conversion at every stage with buyer alignment and relevant messaging. It also offers training and coaching programs based on the analytics of your execution. 
• Fision : Fision helps strengthen the bond between sales and marketing. It gives reps 24/7 access to selling materials and the ability to customize brand-compliant material with a template builder. 
• MindTickle : MindTickle helps teams identify winning rep behavior and conversation. This platform leverages gamification and microlearning tools to make optimizing the sales process fun and engaging. 

Measurement Metrics

The sales metrics and sales KPIs that you focus on will ultimately depend on the desired outcomes of your B2B sales strategy. 

Some strategies, for example, may focus more heavily on the front end of the pipeline, where customer acquisition cost may be important. 

Other strategies are more focused on sales rep behavior, where sales productivity metrics come into play. 

Here are several metrics to consider that will help you measure the effectiveness of your B2B sales strategies: 

• Sales productivity metrics (e.g., number of cold calls, number of follow-ups, number of demos)
• New leads by source 
• Estimated revenue by lead source
• Average lead response time
• Closed won opportunities (by month and/or by quarter)
• Sales pipeline velocity
• Average deal size
• Customer acquisition cost (CAC)
• Churn rate 
• MQL-to-SQL conversion rate
• Average contract value (ACV)
• Annual recurring revenue (ARR) and/or monthly recurring revenue (MRR)
• Lead-to-opportunity ratio
• Win-loss ratios

Tip: Looking to grow your B2B sales team? Grab our guide below.

While it’s true that the best B2B sales strategies are tailor-made for the companies deploying them, there are a few well-known sales strategies that almost every successful company draws from as they create their own.

Before your teams collaborate to design your company’s B2B sales strategy, make sure your sales and marketing departments have a thorough, shared understanding of the following:

• Your current sales process and the resources it requires
• The specifics of your target market, including their content/engagement preferences 
• How many decision-makers are involved in the purchase process, and how they prefer to interact 
• How long you can afford to stretch a sales cycle as you optimize your new sales strategy

Once your teams are on the same page about these details, you can start looking more specifically at how you will design the various components of your sales strategy. There are several well-known, data-backed B2B sales strategies that can help you get the ball rolling as you create your own. 

Solution Selling

Sales reps using a solution selling strategy should plan to spend a lot of time educating their prospects. This takes some practice and mindset work, but it pays off.

Ultimately, the solution selling strategy delivers because it places the seller in the role of trusted consultant to the prospect. This helps the prospect feel valued and cared for throughout the sales process. 

Account-Based Selling

Account-based selling (sometimes also known as account-based marketing or ABM) is one of the most popular B2B selling strategies out there. In fact, it’s more popular than ever — in 2019, Gartner saw a 50% increase in $ 10M+ revenue companies adopting this strategy over a period of just two years. Nearly 75% of these top-performing companies use some kind of account-based selling strategy.

This strategy is almost all prospecting — sales reps’ research and qualifying questions provide the scaffolds for the little bit of pitching that eventually takes place as part of this B2B sales strategy. 

Account-based selling works best for companies that have particularly long or complex sales cycles  or ones that typically require input from several stakeholders. Like strategic selling, account-based selling gives sellers the opportunity to address several unique selling propositions based on the different buyer personas inherently present in the process. 

Social Selling

For as much popularity and success as account-based selling enjoys, there is perhaps no more relevant and pervasive sales strategy today than social selling.

A social selling strategy allows marketers and sales reps to leverage the power of social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter to: 

• Establish their company as a trusted expert and thought leader in the industry
• Attract, converse with, and provide value to prospects and customers
• Build long-term relationships with prospects and colleagues

With nearly 70% of B2B customers reporting that they use social media to research buying decisions, nearly all companies will benefit from adding a social selling component to their B2B sales strategy.

Strategic Selling

Strategic selling is an approach that requires the sales rep to extend their research far into the organization chart of the prospect company.

Usually starting with just a single point of contact, the sales rep must then work to identify and research several additional potential contacts within the organization. Ideally, these will be people of varied roles and levels of influence within the purchase decision.

Once the list of contacts has been established, the rep works to learn about each contact’s influencing factors and develops individualized pitches to meet their various needs.

The strategic selling strategy works because it allows sales reps to display the full range of your product’s capabilities by pitching them all to different people. Once each contact feels assured that your product can solve their individual pain point, they make easy work of convincing one another that your product is a worthy investment.

Does your team have a B2B sales strategy? How effective is it? What steps can you take today to further optimize it?

This guide was updated on September 26, 2023.

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B2B Sales Strategy Planning 2023: How to Create an Effective Plan

A B2B sales strategy mapping plan is a strategic document to increase sales. Strategy planning is often neglected by many business owners. The reasons are many but the main reason is that most business owners lack a sound strategy. They focus more on day-to-day operations than long-term plans.

Any plans involving more than one individual tend to require a planning element before implementation. A sales strategy map is a specific type of sales plan which is used for the purpose of graphically representing the various areas that can be used to aid in increasing the success of your business in this case, it is a map leading to increased sales due to the follow through from implementing established strategies. This paper will outline how an effective plan can be created within this context.

In the past, Sales Strategy Planning has been an event that was tackled during the new year. The best case scenario was that your sales organization would spend a couple of days, dedicating long hours to planning their strategy for the upcoming year. Evolving technology and increasing market disruption require B2B Sales teams to be dynamic and agile – willing to change according to the ever-changing environment.

What are the key characteristics of effective B2B sales strategy planning?

B2B sales strategy planning is a process where you think strategically about your sales organization and how it can improve. It’s not something you do once and then moves on to other things. Instead, it’s an ongoing process that’s part of the strategic thinking that goes into running your business.

Here are some key characteristics of effective B2B sales strategy planning:

It works holistically with other business strategies. Effective B2B sales strategy planning works holistically with your overall business strategy. It considers how the different parts of your company can work together to achieve your company’s objectives. It also considers how different departments within your company interact with one another and how they affect each other.

It considers the needs of multiple stakeholders in the organization. Effective B2B sales strategy planning considers not just the needs of customers but also those of suppliers, employees, and shareholders as well as internal stakeholders like HR, IT, or finance departments who may have an impact on sales performance through their actions or inactions.

It takes into account external factors like market conditions and competitors’ actions which could influence your ability to achieve your goals.”

Planning a sales strategy is one of the most important steps that you can take in your business. The right plan will help you achieve your goals and improve your bottom line.

But what exactly does it mean to have a good plan? What are the key characteristics of effective B2B sales strategy planning?

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We’ve put together a list of four key characteristics that you should consider when creating your plan:

Specificity – Your plan should be as specific as possible so that you can ensure that all tasks are completed on time and within budget.

Clarity – Your plan should be clear and easy to understand by anyone who reads it. This way, everyone involved in implementing the plan will know exactly what needs to be done, when it needs to be done, and how much time they have until deadlines are reached.

Accuracy – It’s difficult to implement a plan if there are inaccuracies within it. Make sure that all information is accurate before putting together your plan so that it won’t need any major changes once it has been implemented.

Flexibility – Your plan should be flexible enough to accommodate any unexpected changes or delays in implementation without causing any problems with the overall process of achieving your goals for the year.

B2B sales strategy planning allocates resources efficiently and effectively

Planning your B2B sales strategy is essential to the success of your business. It’s important to plan your sales strategy because it allocates resources efficiently and effectively.

You want to ensure that you are allocating resources in a way that will bring you the most value for your money. If you don’t plan well enough, then you might spend too much money on things that aren’t worth it. On the other hand, if you allocate too little money, then you might have trouble getting the results that you want for your business.

B2B sales strategy planning involves many different parts of your business and how they work together to create a cohesive whole. You need to consider all aspects of your company from the top down and bottom up in order to create an effective plan.

The first thing that needs to be considered when creating a B2B sales strategy is what type of material will be used during the process – whether it be physical products or digital content such as ebooks or videos. This is important because each type has different costs associated with them which should be considered when creating an allocation of resources accordingly.

How Does B2B Sales Strategy Planning Work?

Sales strategy planning is a process that helps you identify the needs of your customers and develop strategies to satisfy those needs. It helps you plan ahead so that you are prepared for any changes in the market or industry that may affect your business in the future. It also allows you to allocate resources efficiently and effectively so that you can meet these needs when they arise.

B2B sales strategy planning prioritizes effort

The B2B sales planning process is a strategic decision-making tool that helps you prioritize your efforts. It’s not just about setting financial goals; it’s also about aligning your sales strategies with your company’s vision, mission, and values.

This planning process can be broken down into three essential steps:

• Define your business objectives and goals. This is where you’ll identify what you hope to accomplish in the next year or two. For example, if you’re trying to increase revenue by 20% over the next 12 months, then you need to clearly define what that looks like for your company (and for each department).
• Set specific targets for each sales objective. Now that you know what success looks like for your company, it’s time to set goals for each department within it. For example, if one of your objectives is to grow leads by 20%, then each member of the team should have an individual lead goal that contributes toward this overall target.
• Create a detailed action plan with timelines and KPIs (key performance indicators). Once all of this has been established, it’s time to put everything into action with a detailed action plan that outlines exactly what needs to happen — when and by whom.

In a nutshell, the more clarity you have about what you’ve already sold and the more proactive you are at following up on your client base, the less time will be wasted and the more money you’ll make. This is something that has to be worked on all year round and with every single opportunity. 

You now have an outline that will help guide you through the process of planning your sales strategy. Now put it to work! Let us know how it goes in the comments below.

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What is B2B Sales? Definition, process, and techniques

Posted May 23, 2023

By Serena Miller

Editor, Sales Best Practices at Outreach

B2B selling presents unique challenges. Deal cycles are longer, there are more stakeholders involved in the decision making process, and sellers are expected to have expert level knowledge about their products and services. Today, more business operate in a remote or hybrid capacity, which means that digital communication is a crucial skill for any rep. Read on to learn the basics of the B2B sales process.

What is B2B sales?

Business-to-business (B2B) describes the process of selling products or services from one business to another. It involves understanding the specific needs and goals of the buying business and providing tailored solutions to address them. B2B sales often require building relationships, effective communication, and demonstrating value to drive successful transactions in the business-to-business environment. A B2B company is one that sells to other businesses.

Common examples of B2B sales

B2B sales refers to a sales model or a category of selling wherein a business sells its products or services to another business. Because B2B sales usually involves higher price points, more complex processes, and several touchpoints over multiple channels, B2B companies need to maintain a team of highly-trained B2B sales professionals in order to drive revenue.

Here are six categories that would be considered examples of business-to-business companies. 

Manufacturing 

Manufacturers selling heavy machinery, specialized tools, or production equipment cater specifically to other businesses operating in manufacturing sectors. These B2B transactions revolve around delivering machinery that enhances operational efficiency, increases productivity, and helps businesses meet their production goals.

Software solutions

Software companies develop and offer specialized software solutions tailored to the needs of other businesses. Whether it's enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, customer relationship management (CRM) software, or project management tools, these B2B sales involve providing scalable and customizable software to streamline operations and improve productivity for businesses in various industries.

Professional services

Professional services include consulting firms, legal services, accounting firms, marketing agencies, and more. B2B sales in the professional services sector revolve around offering expertise, advice, and specialized services to help businesses overcome challenges, improve performance, and achieve their strategic objectives.

Business consulting and training

Business consulting and training provide valuable guidance and education to other businesses. These services can include management consulting, leadership training, sales training, or specialized workshops. B2B consultants and trainers work closely with companies to identify areas for improvement, offer expert advice, and empower employees to enhance their skills and knowledge.

Wholesale distribution

Wholesale distributors purchase goods in bulk from manufacturers and sell them to retailers or other businesses. Wholesale distributors often deal with a wide range of products, from electronics to consumer goods, and act as intermediaries, ensuring the smooth flow of products from manufacturers to end consumers.

Office supplies and services

Companies specializing in office supplies, stationery, furniture, and technology equipment cater to the needs of other businesses. These transactions involve providing essential supplies to maintain smooth office operations or offering services such as managed print solutions, document management, or office cleaning services.

What's the difference between B2B sales and B2C sales? 

As their names imply, business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) sales primarily differ in their target customers . While B2B companies sell products and services to other businesses, B2C companies consider the general public (or certain segments of it) as their primary market and end consumers.

This main differences between B2B and B2C are as follows:

• Price point : B2B products and services generally have higher prices compared to many consumer goods.
• Size of addressable market : B2C companies target thousands to millions of consumers while B2B companies may just have a few to several hundred potential customers.
• Sales process complexity : B2C customers may easily decide to purchase on the spot while it takes patient lead nurturing before B2B buyers make a positive purchasing decision.
• Number of decision makers : Only one individual is needed for a B2C purchase while multiple stakeholders are required to sign off a B2B deal. On average, B2B buying committees include 11 stakeholders, but that number can flex to upwards of 20.
• Sales methodology . B2B salespeople use sophisticated selling techniques and follow well-calibrated sales processes to succeed, such as MEDDPICC . B2C sellers also need to hone selling skills but operate in a less punishing environment.
• Customer service . To prolong and increase customers’ lifetime value, B2B companies place a high premium on customer experience, client satisfaction, and success.
• Marketing channels : B2B sales often rely on targeted marketing efforts through industry-specific publications, trade shows, and online platforms catering to businesses. B2C sales, on the other hand, utilize a broader range of marketing channels, including advertising through mass media, social media platforms, and retail spaces.
• Decision-making factors : B2B buyers make purchasing decisions based on factors such as ROI, long-term value, and meeting specific business needs. B2C consumers, on the other hand, may be driven by emotional factors, personal preferences, price sensitivity, and convenience.
• Relationship duration : B2B sales often involve longer-term relationships with clients due to the nature of ongoing business transactions and the potential for recurring sales. B2C sales, while also focused on customer loyalty, may have shorter-term interactions with individual consumers.
• Product customization : B2B sales often involve providing customized products or services to meet the unique requirements of business clients. B2C sales, while offering some customization options, typically involve selling standardized products or services to a larger consumer base.
• Sales volume : B2B sales may involve larger order volumes or higher contract values compared to individual consumer purchases in B2C. B2C sales often involve individual transactions with relatively smaller order sizes.
• Sales cycle length : B2B sales cycles can be longer and more complex, involving multiple stages such as lead generation, lead nurturing, proposal development, and contract negotiations. B2C sales cycles are often shorter, with consumers making more immediate purchase decisions.
• Sales velocity : B2B sales tend to have slower sales cycles compared to B2C due to the complexity of the selling process.
• Payment terms : B2B sales may involve negotiated payment terms such as invoices, contracts, and recurring billing agreements, allowing businesses to manage their cash flow. B2C sales typically involve immediate payment, either in-person or through online transactions.

Read more about B2B Sales vs. B2C Sales .

What is a B2B sales representative?

A B2B sales representative is a professional who uses strategic sequences and specialized selling methods to engage corporate buyers. Because corporate buyers tend to research products and services online before contacting a salesperson , these buyers are often well-informed and likely comparing competing products at the same time.

B2B sales representatives are responsible for various tasks to ensure an optimal B2B sales experience, including:

• Make and answer sales calls
• Manage sales emails
• Set meetings
• Conduct product demos/presentations
• Build rapport
• Handle objections
• Identify pain points and solve customer problems
• Prospect for potential clients
• Qualify leads
• Conduct needs analysis
• Create and deliver proposals
• Negotiate and close deals
• Upsell and cross-sell
• Manage accounts
• Collaborate with internal teams
• Perform market research and competitive analysis
• Continuously learn and improve
• Meet sales targets and quotas
• Attend industry events and trade shows
• Provide post-sales support
• Generate sales reports and analyze data

In cases where teams do not have account executives, B2B sales reps own virtually the entire sales cycle, engaging customers throughout the buyer journey — from prospecting and lead nurturing to closing deals.

Learn more about B2B sales reps: what they do and why they are important to a high-performing sales team.

What's the difference between B2B outside sales reps and B2B inside sales reps?

In B2B sales, outside sales professionals often operate outside of an office because they are meeting with prospects and clients or presenting at an event. On the other hand, inside sales professionals engage clients remotely through cold calling, emailing, and video conferencing.

Inside sales professionals can close deals without ever personally meeting their customers. In contrast, outside sales reps almost always make a sale during or shortly after a personal meeting with clients.

This difference in engagement approach requires different skill sets and selling techniques required for either practice. For example, outside sales professionals leverage in-depth product knowledge and in-person communication skills while inside sales professionals become adept in the use of CRMs, a shared sales process, email, and social media.

Recently, however, the line between inside and outside sales has started to blur as outside sales reps begin using the same communication technologies as well as engagement strategies favored by inside sales professionals.

Read more about B2B Inside Sales vs. Outside Sales .

What is the B2B sales process?

B2B selling is a complex process that requires a well-designed and executed B2B sales strategy in order to succeed. It follows a distinct process and uses a wide range of sales techniques for various buyer personas and selling situations.

The exact number and names of stages in your sales process will depend on your industry, company, and sales organization, but the B2B sales process is typically a 5- to 8-stage sales cycle.

Learn more about the B2B Sales Process (plus some tips and tricks for the modern sales pro) .

What is a B2B sales funnel?

In contrast to the B2B sales process which focuses on the sellers' perspective, the B2B sales funnel corresponds to the buyers' journey. The sales funnel often serves as a visualization of a prospect's proximity to or likelihood of making a purchase by identifying the cognitive or emotional phases the prospect undergoes in the buying process.

Most B2B sales funnels consist of 4 to 7 steps. Here is an example of a 7-step B2B sales funnel:

• Delight/Dissatisfaction
• Repurchase/Attrition

Learn more about the B2B Sales Funnel (plus best practices) .

Manage your sales funnel with Outreach

What if every rep could sell like your best rep? Outreach makes it easy for reps to self-source their own pipeline and organize their book of business.

How do you make a B2B sale?

The B2B sales approach involves several factors, including seller competency, sales process effectiveness, product fit, available alternatives, and the buyers purchasing capability and willingness to adopt.

To make all these moving parts work together, businesses need to:

• Build a responsive B2B sales strategy
• Determine the best B2B sales techniques for their teams and ideal customers
• Create well-calibrated playbooks and sequences for their sales reps to follow
• Measure and improve performance

B2B sales techniques

There is an overwhelming number of B2B sales methodologies and frameworks to choose from. While they all claim to be effective, not all will fit your business, your sales organization, or your target customers. Some methods might work well for a specific industry but not others, while other methods succeed only if they fit the type of customer accounts in your portfolio.

Some of the more popular B2B sales techniques and methodologies include:

• Solution Selling
• The Challenger Sale
• Account-Based Sales
• Value Selling
• The Sandler Selling system

Learn more about these 5 popular sales techniques (plus the pros and cons) .

To determine whether a B2B sales technique or a specific sales sequence positively impacts a business, sales organizations identify and measure key performance indicators (KPIs). KPIs are agreed-upon metrics used in assessing a sales organization's performance in different areas such as profitability, sustainability, and efficiency . They are also used to discover trends and to evaluate the productivity and performance of individual sellers.

Common B2B sales KPIs include:

• Quota attainment rate
• Average deal size
• Sales velocity
• New leads generated per month

B2B sales challenges

B2B companies tend to confront several common challenges. The most pressing issues in B2B sales include:

• Sales and marketing misalignment
• Competition for a limited number of potential customers
• Resistance to technology adoption
• Entrenched but outdated sales mindset/culture
• Seller skills/training deficiencies

In 2022, in the aftermath of the pandemic and on the heels of economic uncertainty,  the greatest challenge to B2B sales is efficiency. Here are some of the resources we have for adjusting your B2B sales strategy in an unpredictable market:  

• Webinar:  How top-performing teams use sales tech differently
• Ebook: The sales leader's guide to improving rep productivity
• Article:  How to increase visibility and save at-risk deals

B2B sales tips

Here are some tips for improving B2B sales performance :

• Personalize customer communications. Use technology to help you personalize at scale.
• Never skimp on continuous seller training. B2B buyers are smart — they prefer to engage professionals who demonstrate expertise and empathy.
• Build genuine rapport through active listening, critical thinking, and asking the right questions. Go for omni-channel outreach (mobile, social media, email, events, sales calls, etc.)
• Consider establishing a dedicated sales ops and a sales enablement team .
• Go beyond CRM and marketing automation. Embrace new technologies such as sales engagement and conversation intelligence . Use data to help you make smarter decisions and playbooks.
• Encourage, monitor, and display positive customer feedback. Showcase customer success stories and incorporate case studies into your sales playbook.
• Establish full strategic and tactical alignment among all customer-facing units from marketing and sales to customer success.

What is the future of B2B sales?

B2B sales is in a state of rapid transformation. The line between inside sales and outside sales is fading while best practices for consumer sales — especially when it comes to personalization — are becoming mainstream in B2B.

Sales tools introduced just a few years earlier (such as revenue intelligence platforms ) have already become necessary for survival. Technology and buyer-centricity are shaking the ecosystem as AI and machine learning empower teams to scale both customer engagement and revenue.

The Touchpoint Tango: A sales cycle analysis

Sales performance 101: The new manager's guide

Stakeholder mapping for sales

Discover the sales execution platform.

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The Sales Playbook of Successful B2B Teams

• Jamie Cleghorn,
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Always be data-driven.

High-performing B2B companies are increasingly using sales plays–a coordinated set of actions to create and win an opportunity at a specific customer or prospect, driven by data.

Despite companies spending billions annually on technology to try to systematize operations, business-to-business sales remains remarkably ad hoc and opaque.

• Jamie Cleghorn is a partner with Bain & Company’s Customer Strategy & Marketing practice.
• JL Jordan Lee is a partner with Bain & Co.
• EK Eliza Kennedy is a partner with Bain & Company’s Customer Strategy & Marketing practice.
• RH Randy Huey is a partner with Bain & Company’s Customer Strategy & Marketing practice.

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The Ultimate Guide to B2B Marketing in 2023 [+ New Data]

Discover a variety of B2B marketing strategies you can use to reach and resonate with your business audience

THE ULTIMATE PRODUCT MARKETING GO-TO-MARKET KIT

Ensure that your whole team is aligned with four planning and internal enablement templates for your next product launch.

Updated: 05/04/23

Published: 05/04/23

Effective B2B marketing is difficult to get right. Between creative demands, budget limits, and channel decisions, marketers have a lot to juggle when developing their marketing strategy.

The biggest determinant of effective marketing, however, is your audience .

If you’re not properly targeting your buyer persona , your promotions and advertisements will likely fall on deaf ears. You might as well not be marketing at all.

Where target audiences vary the most, though, is between individual consumers and businesses . Some companies serve individual shoppers, while others cater to companies and organizations.

Marketing to businesses is very different from marketing to individual consumers. That’s why an entirely different marketing method — B2B marketing — exists, and that’s why we built this guide.

By the end of this article, you’ll have a better understanding of B2B marketing, the most effective B2B marketing strategies, and how you can tap into and convert your business audience. Plus, the trends you can expect in the B2B space in 2023, according to new research plus expert tips.

What is B2B Marketing?

B2b vs b2c marketing, b2b marketing strategies.

B2B Marketing Trends to Watch

B2B Marketing Examples

What is b2b.

B2B stands for “business-to-business,” which refers to a business model where businesses sell products and services to other companies as opposed to consumers.

If you’re a new marketer in the B2B space, or a small B2B business owner learning the ropes, B2B marketing can seem new and strange, but not to worry — you’ll soon learn it’s not so different from typical consumer marketing, and we’ll go over everything you need to know so you can create an effective B2B marketing strategy.

B2B (business-to-business) marketing refers to any marketing strategy or content that is geared towards a business or organization. Companies that sell products or services to other businesses or organizations (vs. consumers) typically use B2B marketing strategies.

The purpose of B2B marketing is to make other businesses familiar with your brand name, the value of your product or service, and convert them into customers.

HubSpot is an example of a company that engages in B2B marketing. HubSpot’s customers are other businesses, not individual consumers. Therefore, all of our marketing efforts can be classified as B2B.

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B2B and B2C (business-to-consumer) marketing are very different. B2B and B2C marketing differ in their respective strategies and applications, as well as in their audiences and how they communicate with them .

B2B marketing targets the needs, interests, and challenges of individuals who are making purchases on behalf of, or for, their organization (rather than for themselves), thus making the organization the customer.

Here are a few examples of B2B companies:

A coworking space that leases office spaces to remote teams and freelancers (like Spaces )

An on-demand order fulfillment, warehousing, and screen printing service (like Printful )

A marketing software company that sells social media management tools, lead generation software, and other marketing tools to businesses and organizations (like HubSpot !)

B2C marketing targets the needs, interests, and challenges of individual consumers who are making purchases on behalf of, or for, themselves, thus making the individual the customer. Here are a few examples of B2C companies:

An e-commerce company that sells office supplies to remote or self-employed individuals (like Poppin )

A store that sells t-shirts and other clothing and accessories (like Target )

A music platform that sells streaming subscriptions (like Spotify )

Take a look at this chart comparing B2B and B2C customers.

As much as they differ, though, B2B and B2C also intersect in many ways. While Poppin sells office supplies to remote or self-employed individuals, they also design corporate office spaces and branded supplies.

On the flip side, Printful not only offers order fulfillment and warehousing to businesses; they also fill e-commerce printing orders for individuals.

As distinct as the B2B and B2C marketing audiences can be, B2B marketers can always learn from B2C campaigns , too.

As I said above, marketing depends on its audience. While B2B and B2C marketing vary, not every piece of B2B marketing material is alike, either.

In this section, we’ll talk about various B2B marketing strategies you can implement to reach your specific business audience. Some of these strategies are preparatory, such as identifying your audience, while others are ready to be executed, such as creating a B2B website. Let’s get started.

1. Understand the B2B buyer’s journey.

Before we dive into actual strategies you can implement, it’s important to understand the B2B buyer’s journey . This piece of information will help you create and implement marketing strategies that meet prospects at every stage of their purchase process.

Because of the higher price point of B2B products, B2B sales cycles tend to be a lot longer than B2C cycles. Nurturing these prospects via marketing takes a similarly long time, too, and you must use specific tactics at every stage to drive them toward a purchase decision or a demo request.

In other words: B2B marketing is not as easy as setting up ads on Instagram and hoping for clicks. (We wish! That can work, however, in conjunction with other strategies.)

The B2B buyer’s journey is divided into three stages:

Awareness Stage: The prospect has become aware of a problem and begins educating themselves.

Consideration Stage: The prospect researches solutions for their new problem.

Decision Stage: The prospect is ready to make a purchase or formally begin a buying process.

After understanding the buyer’s journey, take this opportunity to create a customer journey map for your company — or, if you’re a new marketer at a B2B company, asking for one for reference.

A customer journey map is a customized version of the buyer’s journey that shows how your brand interacts with prospects during each phase. When you have that information, you can understand which marketing strategies, such as content marketing, will be most effective at each stage.

2. Identify your target market and target audience.

Now that you have a strong understanding of the buyer’s journey, it’s time to begin understanding who you’re marketing to specifically. Who is taking the buyer’s journey and purchasing your products? You get to decide — and it all begins by identifying who they are.

First up, define your target market . For B2B companies, we first recommend identifying your target companies with firmographic data such as:

• Company size, i.e small, medium, or enterprise
• Company region or location, i.e North America, South America, Africa, or specific countries and regions
• Company industry, i.e healthcare, fintech, or SaaS
• Number of employees

Then, define your target audience — that is, the specific human prospect who is looking for your brand’s products or services. Remember, you’re not marketing to other companies, you’re marketing to people who work at that company.

You can use demographic and psychographic data to identify individual prospects you’ll be marketing to. This may include their:

• Education level

This information will help you create buyer personas and customer profiles , which in turn will help you understand how they make purchase decisions and which marketing channels they’re more likely to use.

For instance, if you’re targeting an entry-level employee, ages 22-26, at a small business in North America, you can likely use social media to reach them effectively.

3. Choose your marketing mix (or the 4 Ps of marketing).

Now that you’re armed with your buyer’s firmographic, demographic, and psychographic information, it’s time to start building a B2B marketing strategy that’s tailored specifically to them. Start by defining your marketing mix, or the 4 Ps of marketing :

• Product: What product you sell
• Price: How much the product costs
• Place: Where the product is sold
• Promotion: Where customers will find out about the product

Defining your 4 Ps is an excellent precursor to creating a more extensive marketing strategy. It marries all of the information you’ve recently found about your potential customers with the information you already know about your own product.

That will empower you to create a more effective strategy than if you jumped right into tactics and execution.

Featured Resource: Marketing Mix Templates

Click here to download the templates for free .

4. Create a B2B marketing plan and a marketing strategy.

Once you’ve defined your marketing mix, you can dive in even more deeply by creating a marketing plan and a marketing strategy . A marketing strategy marries market conditions with your company’s goals, and a marketing plan provides an actionable roadmap with specific channels and metrics.

What’s most important is outlining your own company’s summary and target markets, then deciding where you’ll promote your company. The thing is, it’s all too easy to choose specific strategies, like social media marketing and content marketing, without a strategic approach. That can easily lead to overspending in the wrong areas.

To create a marketing plan and strategy, we recommend starting with a template.

Featured Resource: Free Marketing Plan Template

Click here to download HubSpot's free Marketing Plan Template.

Using this template, you’ll be able to compile all the information you need to choose the right B2B marketing channels for your company. You’ll be able to lay out your:

• Business Summary and Initiatives
• Target Market
• Market Strategy
• Marketing Channels
• Marketing Technology

In this list, we could have easily shared specific marketing tasks you can do, such as creating online content or publishing short videos. And while these things will likely be a worthy use of your time, it’s more important to spend your time strategizing to minimize marketing costs and increase your ROI .

Strategizing is the core of your B2B marketing strategy — not implementing specific tactics such as blogging or SEO. Those will come later once you have defined the big picture.

5. Cover all of your B2B marketing bases, such as launching a website.

It’s time to dive into the more tactical aspects of your B2B marketing strategy by ensuring all of your marketing bases are covered. But we don’t want to dive too deeply yet; this is about nailing down the basics. The “basics” will vary per industry; for instance, in a more traditional vertical, you might rely less on your website and more on industry events.

That said, you want to ensure your B2B company has covered most of the following things (click on each one for a checklist to run through):

• Launching a website
• Creating and maintaining your social media profiles
• Starting an email marketing newsletter
• Signing up for industry events and conferences

No matter which B2B industry you’re in, and regardless of your audience type and age, these things will likely benefit you. Later, we’ll cover specific types of B2B marketing that you can integrate under each of these strategies. But here’s a good introduction:

• Strategies for your website: Content marketing , blogging , SEO
• Strategies for your social media profiles: Social media marketing , paid social media , short form video marketing
• Strategies for your email marketing newsletter: Email marketing , lead nurturing
• Strategies for industry events and conferences: Event marketing , trade show marketing

6. Run a competitive analysis.

To choose your specific marketing strategies even more strategically, carry out a competitive analysis .

Scope out the market and see which businesses are marketing to your target audience. Learn what they’re currently doing — do they have a website? A presence on a specific social media platform, such as LinkedIn? Things to be on the lookout for when inspecting competitors are:

• Competitor product offerings
• Competitor sales tactics and results
• Competitor marketing content and social media presence

Featured Resource: 10 Competitive Analysis Templates

Download Now

Getting a general overview of these items can help you recognize your competitors’ strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats — otherwise known as a SWOT analysis . Once you understand where they stand, you can better compete with them and choose the best channels.

If none of your competitors are on Instagram, for instance, then Instagram marketing may not be a good strategy to pursue (or, at least, you should test it out first before investing too many resources in it).

7. Determine your brand positioning.

Next, define your brand positioning in the market. This statement is the who, when, why, and how of your brand identity — or the way your brand is perceived through the eyes of the customer.

This will help you cultivate a consistent brand image, regardless of the marketing channels and tactics you use.

Devise a brand positioning statement that your team and prospective customers can believe in, and you’ll be ready for the next step.

Featured Resource: Positioning Statement Templates

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8. Explore marketing channels to use.

By now, you’ve likely run across the different types of marketing channels your competitors use successfully, and the channels they haven’t taken advantage of. You’ve also likely gotten an idea of what you want to do based on your big-picture strategizing so far.

With the previous steps completed, you’re ready to diversify your B2B marketing portfolio and reach the businesses you need to. Depending on your customer segments and competitor analysis, you can now explore channels, strategies, and tools to optimize your leads and customer funnels.

Next up, let’s look at the types of B2B marketing you can implement now that you’ve created your overall strategy.

Types of B2B Marketing

The following categories are B2B marketing channels bound to connect you to your target audience.

B2B Email Marketing

Email marketing is a tried and true method of reaching both individual consumers and business customers. Most B2B marketers use email — are you one of them? You should be. Emails lead to engagement, which turns subscribers into leads … and then customers.

Download our guide to optimizing email marketing for conversions and learn how to grow your email list, ensure deliverability, and increase engagement .

Unlike B2C customers who respond best to emotions and entertainment, B2B customers look for logic and positive ROI. Essentially, they’re asking themselves, How can your business help my business grow? Because of this, your email marketing must consistently resonate with your business customers and focus on things that matter to them — like time, money, and resources.

Email marketing is also a powerful vehicle for sharing your brand’s content. Many B2B companies use email newsletters as part of their content marketing program, and the B2B marketers we’ve spoken to say these newsletters are most critical to their content marketing success.

With the constant barrage of emails flooding our inboxes today, it’s more important than ever to create and send out effective marketing emails. To help you create emails that stand out, you can use HubSpot's AI Email Writer .

B2B Email Marketing Best Practices

Write enticing subject lines . Think about your email subject lines as a Netflix trailer — if you can’t hook your audience with a two-minute clip (or, in this case, a few dozen characters), don’t expect them to open and watch (or read) the whole thing. We recommend spending almost as much time on your email subject lines as you do on the emails themselves.

Stick to one call-to-action (CTA) per email . If you think the number of emails you receive is a lot, take a look at the CTAs in those emails … some are packed with two, three, and sometimes up to 10 different CTAs. Don’t make this mistake, which can leave your recipients’ heads spinning, asking “What should I click on first?” and ultimately clicking on nothing. With one CTA per email, you allow your audience to focus on your email content and ultimately one action … a welcome reprieve from today’s frequent decision-making and analysis paralysis.

Segment your email to reach the most relevant audience . Not every email you send will be appropriate for everyone on your list. Your subscribers may be at different stages of the buyer’s journey or be seeking different solutions. That’s where email list segmentation comes into play. Not only does this help you relate to your audience better, but it gives your emails that personal feel that says “Hey, I’m listening and I know what you’d like to see.” Consumers prefer email quality over quantity anytime.

Make sure your email designs are responsive . Most email users access their inbox on their phones, and emails that don’t show up correctly on mobile devices are often deleted. Ouch. Don’t let your email be one of those.

Don’t be afraid of the cold email . As uncomfortable as it is, the right email can convert new customers — like these cold sales email templates , which will help you get your leads’ attention.

👉🏼 HubSpot Tip : You can’t send marketing emails without any recipients — these people make up your lists. There are plenty of easy ways to grow your email list . Begin with opt-in forms on your website homepage, About page, and blog. Check out HubSpot’s Free Form Builder tool to get started.

B2B Digital Marketing

Every business, whether B2B or B2C, should have a digital presence — which is comprised of paid ads, search engine optimization, a website, and any other place your B2B company is active online. Let’s walk through a handful of tactics that can strengthen your B2B digital marketing strategy.

1. Define your target audience.

A strong B2B digital marketing strategy starts with defining your target audience, or buyer persona . This demographic and psychographic information will inform almost every other marketing activity thereafter, ensuring your content and digital material is absorbed by the right eyes and ears (and that no resources go to waste on your end).

2. Create your website.

Secondly, digital marketing can’t quite function without an informative, engaging website. Most buyers visit a website before making a purchase. Moreover, since the typical B2B sales cycle often involves many key players (such as gatekeepers, decision makers , and other folks who have to buy into a purchase), websites are easy, straightforward ways for influencers to share information about your product or service.

For inspiration on how the best B2B websites are built to impress, check out this video:

3. Optimize your digital presence.

Your website needs to be more than informative and engaging, though … it needs to be discoverable. You can do this with on-page SEO and technical SEO tactics. These include everything from image alt-text and meta descriptions (what your visitors can see) to structured data and site speed (what your visitors can’t see). Off-page SEO is also at play here, which refers to external linking strategies and social sharing — SEO tactics that take place off your website.

4. Run PPC campaigns.

Finally, round out your digital presence with pay-per-click (PPC) advertising , which allows you to get your content and brand in front of new audiences via search engines and other advertising platforms. I recommend maximizing your PPC investment by advertising more than your specific products or services — such as your brand personality, blog or social media content, or company tagline.

The best way to see an ROI from your paid ads is by 1) incorporating your buyer persona data and 2) boosting content that they can relate to. For example, it’s highly unlikely a brand new consumer who’s never heard of you is searching for your exact product.

They may be searching for a location-based solution or product feature. To reach the greatest number of potential customers, pay to target relevant categories within your brand vs. promoting your product or services.

B2B Content Marketing

We’ve talked about how B2B customers are focused on expertise, driven by logic, and desire to be educated. What better marketing tool to satisfy these priorities than B2B content marketing ?

Whereas a traditional PR marketing strategy interrupts a consumer’s day-to-day with promotional material, a content marketing strategy adds valuable information and informs the consumer — which is precisely what B2B customers are looking for. Not to mention that content marketing supports SEO efforts, which involves anticipating what your audience is searching for , helping them discover your website and content … and potentially converting them to customers.

It's important to note, content marketing is most effective when you align your content to various stages of the buyer's journey. As Jonathan Franchell, CEO and Founder of Ironpaper . points out: "Effective content in the awareness phase educates the buyer on their pain points."

"A frequent mistake B2B organizations make is educating the buyer on their own company, product, or service. The buyer isn't ready for that; they are just beginning to understand their problem."

Franchell adds, "Additionally, B2B companies should test content. Run a test on an incentive and vary the type of content - use a webinar, an ebook, or a video. Understand what format of content attracts the right types of buyers and measure it down to an individual human level."

Business decision makers prefer to get information from an article than an ad. Knowing this, I’d say you should be putting the same (if not more) resources into your content marketing than your traditional advertising strategy.

Because the B2B buyer’s journey is slightly different than the B2C buyer’s journey (which has shorter sales cycles and fewer decision makers involved), the content you create for your B2B content marketing strategy may vary more than the content you’ve seen as a consumer yourself, as illustrated in the below graphic.

Before you start creating content, though, I recommend creating a business blog . (Don’t worry, growing your blog readership is easier than you think.) Your blog will house all the content you create and serve as a home base for readers to visit and subscribe to.

B2B Social Media Marketing

Believe it or not, B2B buyers and C-Suite executives can and do use social media when making a purchase. That’s right — social media marketing isn’t just for brands targeting individual consumers.

Many B2B companies struggle with social media marketing, though. It can be harder to use social media to connect with business customers, especially because (as we mentioned above) there’s typically a lengthier sales cycle and longer chain of command.

Honestly, B2B social media marketing might not be where you convert the greatest number of leads, and that’s OK. It likely comes into play near the beginning of your customers’ buyer’s journeys.

Social media is a powerful tool for building brand awareness, giving your company an online personality, and humanizing your business — all very powerful factors when it comes to marketing and connecting with potential customers. Like email marketing, social media is also a highly effective channel for sharing your content and enhancing your brand expertise, the latter of which we know B2B customers appreciate.

Overwhelmed by social media? Spend more time connecting with your followers with our time-saving suite of social tools.

While your social media accounts might not convert as frequently as your content or email marketing, they’re just as important. In this case, followers are just as valuable — you never know when they might convert to leads or customers.

👉🏼 HubSpot Tip : Content shared by employee advocates can generate more engagement than content shared by brands. So, involve your employees in your B2B social media marketing strategy. Encourage them to create their own social media channels and share about life at your company. Create a culture account ( like our @HubSpotLife Instagram ) to show what’s going on at work, not just what you’re selling. You never know — this might attract strong talent, too.

B2B Marketing Trends to Watch in 2023 [New Data]

HubSpot's Blog team conducted research to determine the challenges, opportunities, and initiatives that most B2B marketers are focusing on in 2023.

Let's dive in.

1. Generating leads and traffic is the top challenge for marketers.

Top of mind for everyone this coming year is generating more traffic. Marketers surveyed in our 2023 Industry Trends Report cited generating leads and traffic as the top challenge they face, followed by hiring talent and pivoting their marketing strategy to round out the top three answers.

With changes on the horizon and a potential recession looming, it's no surprise 17% of marketers are concerned with pivoting their marketing strategy. Throw in increased competition, and budget constraints and it's safe to say marketers have their work cut out for them in 2023.

2. Marketers anticipate struggling to keep up with trends in 2023.

Marketing trends move fast, so it’s not surprising that marketers we surveyed cited keeping up with trends as a top concern heading into 2023.

Facing increased competition, leveraging CRM systems, and having to pivot marketing strategy rounded out the top five concerns on the horizon for marketers.

3. Social media marketers report 'creating engaging content' will be their number one challenge in 2023.

22% of social media marketers marked "creating engaging content" as the number one challenge they believe they'll face in 2023.

With nearly all businesses utilizing social media vying for customer attention, competition is stiff. Businesses have had to evaluate what makes them stand out above the crowd and how they can better engage and target prospects. To make their best efforts shine, marketers have been utilizing a variety of formats, which we'll dive into next.

4. Marketers leverage video the most.

When it comes to marketing formats, video is the preferred choice with 50% of marketers making it their go-to option. Images came in a close second with 47% of marketers utilizing this format.

Video also provided the most ROI when compared to other formats like images, blog posts, podcasts, and case studies.

It’s popularity isn’t expected to wane anytime soon. Video is expected to grow among new users in 2023 with 1 in 3 planning to leverage this format next year.

5. Influencer marketing was the trend leveraged most this year.

As a result of the pandemic, we've seen an immense shift in how consumers' shop, with the majority now shopping online — and, in particular, purchasing products directly on social media .

It makes sense, then, that B2B marketers want to ensure their products or services are showing up on social channels with influencer partnerships.

Influencer marketing is projected to become a $13.8 billion dollar industry by the end of this year, and it's showing no signs of slowing down.

Most B2B marketers — 71% — planned on investing more in influencer marketing this year, and likely was a wise choice as this avenue will continue to grow in 2023.

However, you'll want to ensure you choose partnerships wisely. While it can be tempting to find influencers with massive audiences, many businesses have seen more success with micro-influencers, so be sure to do your research to determine which influencers have the most authentic connections with your desired audience.

6. Facebook leads in ROI, but other platforms are gaining popularity.

Our 2023 Trends Report found that not only was Facebook the most widely used marketing platform, but also provided marketers the most ROI . Out of the marketers surveyed, 18% stated they plan to invest in Facebook the most, followed by TikTok and YouTube tied with 16%.

While Facebook provides the most ROI, investment in other platforms is on the rise. YouTube is expected to see the most growth in 2023 with marketers with 91% of those using it planning to increase their investment.

Measuring ROI can be easier for some activities compared to others. For instance, it's easy enough to track a social media advertising campaign's ROI if you're tracking sales made from an ad placed on Facebook. Sales is a tangible outcome, and Facebook's Ad Manager enables you to easily track ROI from your efforts.

However, other activities can be more difficult to track. Analyzing which pieces of social or blog content resulted in sales, for instance, can be a more arduous and convoluted process.

To combat this challenge, take a look at How to Calculate ROI in Marketing [Free Excel Templates].

Additionally, consider A/B testing various marketing activities and tracking ROI to determine which platforms traditionally have the biggest ROI for your business. For instance, most marketers find the highest ROI from Facebook — but this could vary for your brand or business needs.

7. The number one goal for marketers in 2023 is increasing revenue.

Understanding your big-picture goals is imperative for creating an effective marketing strategy for 2023 — so it's likely helpful to know what other B2B marketers' plan to focus on next year. .

Looking ahead, B2B marketers’ top priority is to increase revenue and sales, knocking increasing brand awareness down to the third spot from last year.

Top marketing goals:

• Increase revenue
• Improve customer experience
• Increase brand awareness
• Increase engagement
• Improve brand loyalty

Roughly half of B2B marketers reported that 'increasing brand awareness' was their number one goal in 2022.

Brand awareness is critical for fostering trust, long-term loyalty, and brand equity. It makes sense, then, that so many marketers feel it's critical for long-term success.

Additionally, Chief Evangelist at Terminus Sangram Vajre says he predicts that data collection will become a major priority for brands.

As he puts it, "The quality of our campaigns and initiatives will increasingly rely on our CRM, CDP, and 3rd-party sources to help create stylized, targeted, and convertible marketing initiatives. And since CMOs are increasingly held to ROI numbers, we have to up our game."

To consider how you might manage your data in a more efficient, sustainable way, take a look at Everything You Need to Know About Data Management .

Additionally, if you're unsure how you can continue tracking your audience without using third-party cookies, read 7 Marketing Alternatives to Tracking Cookies .

8. This year marketers stopped leveraging podcasts and audio content, while others stopped implementing VR and AR.

As important as it is to learn what marketers plan to do , it's equally vital to learn what they plan not to do. This can help you identify your own guardrails, and ensure you're sticking to the most efficient marketing strategies, rather than wasting time and resources on all of them.

HubSpot's Blog Research found 25% of marketers plan to stop leveraging podcasts and audio content ; followed closely by 23% who plan to stop leveraging VR and AR .

This doesn't mean these activities are inefficient, but it does suggest that some survey respondents found the time, effort, and resources required for each of these efforts wasn't worth it. Ultimately, it depends on your audiences' preferences.

If your audience doesn't enjoy consuming business content on podcast or audio formats, then re-consider investing in these initiatives.

However, audio content isn't going anywhere — so if you haven't already, you might consider testing various audio formats in 2023 to see how they perform with your audience. If you're unsure how to get started, take a look at Everything You Need to Know About Starting a Podcast or Clubhouse vs. Podcasts: Which Should Marketers Use? [Data + Expert Tips] .

9. Philanthropy is best when it's genuine.

Carla Andre-Brown, a Content Marketer at Mailbird told me, "Brand-building activities will look to work with social and environmental causes in a format that is ongoing and builds recognition for both parties. Marketers will need to be especially mindful of the way they present their company, to avoid being accused of having poor intentions."

"For instance," Andre-Brown continues, "a company using the Pride theme each summer without having policies that protect LGBTQ2IA+ employees is called 'Rainbow washing'. To ensure this work is well-received and has an impact, marketers should listen to their communities' suggestions and look for sustainable changes that everyone can benefit from."

A B2B marketing approach that works for one business may not work for another, but that’s not to say we can’t learn something from the pros. Here are eight B2B marketing examples of businesses who did it right.

1. Social Media Marketing: Adobe

TikTok can seem like a difficult platform to stand out as a B2B brand, but some companies have managed to attract thousands — if not millions — of viewers to their videos through high-quality content and an understanding of the app.

Take software company Adobe, which has 262.3K followers and 2 million likes on its TikTok account .

When Adobe first joined the app, the company's second video got over 2 million views. The video asked its audience, Who is a creative TikToker we should know about?, which encouraged high audience engagement.

Adobe succeeds on the app because it creates engaging content specifically catered for TikTok's audience. All Adobe's videos are short, entertaining, and easily digestible.

Take the following example, which has over 370K views and highlights how user @emilesam used Adobe's After Effects edit to create a fighting sequence against himself.

@adobe May the force be with @emilesam in his #AfterEffects edit. ✨ #Adobe #foryoupage #fyp #foryoup ♬ original sound - Adobe

The brand does a good job highlighting its products in a fun, non-promotional way. Both consumers and businesses can see a clear connection between using Adobe's products and finding success on TikTok — which makes this a great example of B2B marketing.

2. Content Marketing: Shopify

Ecommerce company Shopify produces many different types of content resources, such as a blog, business courses, and community events. But one content avenue that helps the brand stand out is its podcast , aptly titled Shopify Masters: The ecommerce business and marketing podcast for ambitious entrepreneurs.

The podcast focuses on inspiration stories from entrepreneurs, and offers practical tips for starting an online business on Shopify. Episode topics range from "Disrupting the Soda Industry with a Healthy Spin" to "How Masks For Dogs Landed a Deal on Shark Tank".

Offering so much valuable, interesting content for free is a fantastic example of effective B2B marketing, which should always provide value before it tries to extract it.

3. Digital Marketing: Mailchimp

Mailchimp's homepage is easy to navigate, clean, and focuses entirely on its customers' pain points.

Consider, for instance, the first large text you see when you click on the page: "Get down to business and grow sales". The smaller text below it reads, "Engage your customers and boost your business with Mailchimp's advanced, yet easy-to-use marketing platform."

The language focuses on the customer, and how Mailchimp can help the customer reach their goal: To grow their businesses.

Additionally, the website offers a banner at the top of the page that enables customers to choose in which language they'd prefer to view the website. Even the company's Products navigation menu includes how the product can "Get Your Business Online" and "Market Your Business".

Ultimately, the company demonstrates how much they value each of their customers by tailoring each piece of content towards its customers' unique challenges.

4. Client Testimonials: Venngage

Venngage took its positive client testimonials and sprinkled them throughout its website. This social proof lets prospects know that you have a track record of reliability, and have delighted previous customers beyond expectation. Not only that, but sharing testimonials can have a big impact on potential consumers in the Consideration and Decision stages .

After all, 98% of consumers read online reviews for local businesses, which is up from 81% in 2019, so using client feedback is a great tool to attract new ones.

Image Source

5. B2B SEO: TravelPerk, Google

A B2B buyer spends 27% of the time in the purchase journey independently researching online, potentially using at least one search engine during the online research. It’s worth the time and money to invest in making sure other businesses can find you with ease.

TravelPerk displays a diverse range of paid search and SEO. An impressive SEO strategy is its use of topic clusters and sub-topics for reaching its target audience. TravelPerk ensures that search engine pages like “business travel expenses” have a paid ad leading to its website, or high-ranking blog content providing information travelers are looking for.

6. Inside Influence Marketing: IBM, Influencer and Employee Advocacy Program

IBM Systems business group has seen the growing importance of employee voice and the rise of employee influencers as a strategy in B2B marketing.

In the words of Ryan Bares , Global Social Programs Lead, he states, “In the B2B marketing world, we’ve all come to understand that buyers trust individual voices more than formal marketing and advertising messages, so finding ways to optimize influence internally is becoming a key area of focus.”

Leveraging employees in your company that have an affinity for the industry, vast knowledge of trending topics and your brand, could be key in building new relationships in the industry.

7. B2B Referral Program: Blackbaud, Blackbaud Champions

Blackbaud offers an incredible B2B referral program that incentivizes current customers to become product advocates — Blackbaud Champions. Champions are encouraged to share their insight into how the implementation process works, what it’s like to work with the team, and how Blackbaud solutions have helped you advance their mission.

“When you share your experiences and expertise and help us spread the word about our products and services, we’ll reward you with benefits only available to Champions. By providing your feedback, participating in activities like reference calls and case studies, and sharing educational content and events on social media, you’ll earn Reward Points in the Blackbaud Champions Hub which you can redeem from the Champions Rewards”

These points are what Champions strive to redeem, as they include incentives like discounts, complimentary passes, gift cards and VIP experiences, and more.

Referral programs are a great way to kindle customer loyalty and have advocates spread the word about your business through the network.

Invest in B2B Marketing and Reach Your Business Customers

Marketing isn’t effective unless you keep your audience in mind, and no other audience is as fickle and critical as business customers. Your marketing should communicate how your business can help theirs, and if it doesn’t, you can redirect your B2B marketing strategies to reach them.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in March 2021 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

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B2B Business Plan Template

MAR.22, 2014

B2B Business plan for starting your own business

Dealing directly with customers is a hassle, right? Well, due to the integration of monetary chains and dependence of businesses on one another for manufacturing as well as services, the B2B businesses are getting high in demand.

If you also want to start a B2B business, you should do a little research, choose the areas in which you want to serve, make a business plan, and launch your startup. For you to understand how to make an accurate business plan, we are providing a B2B e-commerce business plan of a startup namely Networks.

While the business plan for investors developed for Networks can give you a detailed insight into B2B business, you should still consider hiring a professional for the purpose. It is because dealing with businesses involves complexities and strict adherence to principles with the agreements and contracts. A professional can take care of even the smallest details while making business plan B2B correctly.

Executive Summary

2.1 the business.

Networks will be owned by Max Clint. The business will be based in New York City which is considered the hub of businesses. The businesses will provide various services in the B2B niche including outsourcing, HR services, software services, and more. The business activities are expected to go beyond NYC because Clint aims at providing freelance services as well.

2.2 Management of B2B business

B2B business requires adherence to extremely strict standards and therefore, the management of B2B business can be a headache if you don’t follow a proper plan. Before entering the enterprise, you must make a proper B2B SaaS business plan that covers all the management aspects.

To help you, we will document the personnel plan and operational B2B business plan made for Networks. If you are getting a franchise you won’t be the all-in-all decision-making authority, and in that case, you will have to consult business plan for a franchise for an effective management plan.

2.3 Customers of B2B business

The customers as indicated in B2B e-commerce business plan of Networks are as follows:

• Small Businesses
• Established Enterprises
• Business Franchises

2.4 Business Target

The business targets of the Networks are given as follows in this B2B business plan sample:

• Increase the cost of our services by 3% after 3 years of the launch while retaining the customer base
• Earning a profit margin of more than $50k per month by the end of the first 6 years

Company Summary

3.1 company owner.

Max Clint, the owner of Networks, has worked as a business consultant for more than 5 years. He is known to be an expert in legal business matters and management.

3.2 Why the B2B business is being started

The B2B is started because of Clint’s experience and interest in the field. His qualification, co-curricular activities, and desire for excellence have driven him to start this business. 

3.3 How the B2B business will be started

Step1: Develop Business Plan for B2B sales

The first step to step into this business is to create a B2B business plan template. For that you should explore what is B2B startup and read some B2B business plan examples. In a B2B startup business plan you should include your strategic plan, financial plan, customer segments, and marketing analysis.

Step2: Create the Brand

Since many B2B businesses are already running in the United States. You have to come up with exclusive ideas and expertise to become renowned in the market. To create a brand image, you should have highly specialized employees and success stories.

Step3: Establish Web Presence

In the information age, services are searched for on the web rather than on paper. Therefore, you must ensure that your business comes in the top lists of searches. For that, you would need to hire SEO experts, a graphic designer, and a web developer.

Step4: Develop & Market

The last step is to establish your company’s physical presence and market your venture to reach a maximum number of customers.

Services of B2B business

The service sector of B2B businesses is multi-faceted. Therefore, while developing your B2B SaaS business plan template you should specify which services you plan to provide. You can study many B2B business plan examples for the purpose and explore their B2B marketing strategies examples for each service they provide.

You can also see the services given in this B2B business plan sample. This B2B business plan was created for Networks by professional business plan writers after probing several B2B business plan templates.

• Doing Outsourced Tasks

Our major service will be doing outsourced tasks such as hiring and training the workforce, maintaining the equipment, and completing some parts of a larger project.

• Business Consultancy

We will provide legal advice and consultation to businesses that come to deal with other businesses. We will also help writing business plan documents and making due diligence template . Moreover, our consultation will also be educational as we plan to acquaint our partners with the latest trends such as type of due diligence in use.

• Software Services

We will also provide software services but only in the domain in which multiple businesses are connected via shared database and management software.

• Freelance Services

We will serve as the middle ground between clients and customers to provide B2B freelance services.

Marketing Analysis of B2B business

Excellent work.

excellent work, competent advice. Alex is very friendly, great communication. 100% I recommend CGS capital. Thank you so much for your hard work!

Your B2B business can end in loss if you fail to attract the community that was supposed to buy from you. To succeed in the purpose, you have to explore the market for which you are making B2B sales business plan. you have to see which services are in demand and how much competition exists for which service. All these details must be included in your marketing plan for B2B business. 

Today, carrying out a market analysis is easier due to the online presence of B2B businesses. You will have to maintain a web presence and thus your marketing plan for B2B business should be devised accordingly.

To gain an insight into marketing plan template B2B, you should visit B2B marketing portals. Some sites even offer free B2B website in usa. Moreover, you can also find free guidance on B2B marketing planning from blogs like this on marketing plan B2B example. 

5.1 Market Trends

The trends for B2B businesses are going great. It is reported that more than 50% of B2B buyers are millennials. The industry is currently estimated at 6.7 trillion dollars. Moreover, 35% of the already-established B2B businesses are expecting a significant rise in online sales in the next years.

The trends provided in this sample B2B marketing plan are general. And while developing your B2B marketing business plan you should study the trends specific to your area.

5.2 Marketing Segmentation

Identifying the groups of target customers help you determine a focused strategy in B2B marketing project to target them. For a B2B company, customers can belong to various niches therefore it will be good to also explore some more business plans such as mobile notary business plan pdf .

In this example B2B marketing plan, the customer segments identified by Networks are given as follows:

5.2.1 Small Businesses & Startups

Our biggest customers will be the small businesses that are especially newly established. New startups find it difficult to undertake all the tasks and recruit a huge workforce. Therefore, they rely on other businesses. In addition, due to a lack of trust in financial stability, they find it difficult to enter into long-term contracts with large enterprises. With our B2B services, they will be able to develop their businesses.

5.2.2 Established Enterprises

The second biggest category of our target customers includes established enterprises. They would require our services to deal with their business partners. Moreover, they will also seek our services to maintain a skilled workforce at all times.

5.2.3 Business Franchises

Business franchises would also need our services to get business plans and to do successful contracts.

5.2.4 Industries

Industries whose inputs and outputs are procured and transferred to enterprises will also need our B2B services to conduct their business affairs.

5.3 Business Target

• Increase our prices by 3% by the end of the first 6 years
• Maintain a CSAT score of 95+ from the very first month of our launch
• Maintain a Customer Retention Rate of more than 80% from the very first year of our launch

5.4 Product Pricing

The rates for our services are a little bit higher than our competitors. However, due to our competitive advantages, we still expect to get more customers than them.

Marketing Strategy of B2B business

While developing marketing strategy in B2B, you must keep in mind that this time you are not dealing with a man in the street, rather you will be dealing with experienced professionals. Therefore, your sales strategy and advertisement techniques should be devised accordingly. In this B2B marketing strategy example, we are providing the sales strategy of the Networks.

Clint spent a whole 3 months devising his strategy in his B2B marketing template. Some parts of his plan are mentioned here in this B2B marketing strategy template.

6.1 Competitive Analysis

• We are using the latest tech for all our tasks. For instance, we present digital cards to our business partners to leave the impression that at Networks, we are acquainted with all the latest products and trends.
• We have hired the most competent and talented business experts in the town.
• We have pursued regular training programs to keep our employees up to date.

6.2 Sales Strategy

For advertisement, the Networks will do the following:

• Advertising the business on social media and through newspapers and magazines
• Arranging meetups among the business CEOs and our sales executives to let our competitive aspects known
• Providing a 40% discount on all our services for the first month of the launch

For more ideas, you can see law firm business plan and judgement recovery business plan.

6.3 Sales Monthly

6.4 Sales Yearly

6.5 Sales Forecast

Personnel plan of B2B business

The success of a B2B business depends on the ability of its employees to conduct affairs. To ensure you hire the right people, you should devise a measurable criterion in your business plan for B2B. In your business plan B2B you can assign measurable values to experience, interpersonal skills, and qualifications to make sure the recruitment remains impartial 

In this B2B business plan template the list of staff of Networks along with their salaries is listed below: 

7.1 Company Staff

• 1 Co-Manager
• 1 Web Manager
• 1 Sales Executive
• 1 Software Manager
• 3 Business Consultants
• 1 Legal Advisor
• 2 Project Managers

7.2 Average Salary of Employees

Financial plan of b2b business.

The B2B business has great prospects in the earning domain. The business pays a lot due to immense opportunities arising out of increased dependency on other businesses for completing a task. The modern world works on the principles of efficiency and for greater efficiency outsourcing a part of one’s business is becoming a must.

Therefore, the business is sustainable as far as finances are concerned. However, to ensure long-term smooth monetary flows, you need a business plan for B2B sales. Since you will be spending a hefty amount on salaries and maintaining a skilled workforce at all times, you need to be careful about the b to b sales strategies. 

In this B2B sales plan template, we are providing the financial plan of Networks. In addition to the profit profile, if you also want to know what is B2B marketing and sales, you can refer to the sections written above.

8.1 Important Assumptions

8.2 break-even analysis.

8.3 Projected Profit and Loss

8.3.1 profit monthly.

8.3.2 Profit Yearly

8.3.3 Gross Margin Monthly

8.3.4 Gross Margin Yearly

8.4 Projected Cash Flow

8.5 Projected Balance Sheet

8.6 business ratios.

• What is the B2B business plan?

A B2B business plan is a detailed document that explains the major aspects of your business, how you plan to start and run it, and where and how much you intend to spend to ensure long-term sustainability.

To get a better idea of what a B2B business plan template is, you should study some B2B business plan examples. For a generic idea, this B2B business plan sample is also good to go.

• What are the 4 types of B2B?

The 4 types of B2B markets are: 

• Institutions 

Download B2B Business Plan Template From Here

OGSCapital’s team has assisted thousands of entrepreneurs with top-rate business plan development, consultancy and analysis. They’ve helped thousands of SME owners secure more than $1.5 billion in funding, and they can do the same for you.

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7 steps to creating an audience-based B2B marketing plan

I f you’re still taking a one-size-fits-all approach to your marketing campaigns, blasting the same messages across channels to a broad audience, you’re leaving revenue on the table. Today’s B2B buyers expect a personalized experience tailored to their specific needs, industry pain points and stage in the customer journey. Generic campaigns won’t cut it anymore.

The key to unlocking more marketing-driven revenue is adopting an audience-based planning approach. Rather than promoting your products or services en masse, this strategy involves segmenting your target accounts and prospects into distinct audiences. You can then craft customized messaging, content and channel strategies that speak directly to what each audience cares about most.

The benefits of audience planning

Nearly 75% of customers expect better-personalized experiences as technology advances, according to Salesforce’s State of the Connected Customer . For revenue-generating marketers, that means thinking bigger picture than first-name variables or campaigns to “CFOs in New York at companies with $15 million in revenue.” 

In multi-channel marketing campaigns, personalization also means getting granular with where your prospects are in their customer journey, what industries they belong to, what pain points they are experiencing and what product or service(s) are most likely to resonate with them in this exact moment. 

I call this audience-based planning — a way to take what your sales team wants to sell and to whom and pair it with what your data can tell you about that target audience’s interests, pain points and journey stage. You might also call this “sales-driven marketing” rather than marketing-driven sales — as in this type of plan, you’re letting the sales team dictate exactly who they want , sometimes even down to the account names. If you’re new to account-based marketing (ABM), this probably sounds familiar, as planning with very specific accounts provided by a selling team is critical to any solid ABM strategy.

On the marketing front, planning by audience (and customer journey) ensures marketing dollars are spent on the accounts most likely to be in the buying cycle. Since only 5% of B2B buyers are actively in the market for new services every quarter (per a 2021 report from Ehrenberg-Bass Institute ) and the average buyer cycle in B2B marketing could be anywhere from six months to five years, this type of plan can help you narrow down your targeting efforts to:

• Who is an ideal customer?
• Where is that customer in the buyer journey (beginning, middle or end)?
• What messaging is most likely to resonate?

As a bonus, the quality of leads handed off to the selling team is greatly improved, and your relationship with them as a supportive resource is improved, too. 

Dig deeper: Why we care about audience development

How to create an audience-based marketing plan

Getting started with your audience-based plans is simpler than you might think.

Step 1: Align on key sales goals and team roles

Your goals planning might look something like this:

• Sales leadership: Communicates sales growth goals and any key focus areas for the year. Gets specifics on company size, key buyers, industries, pain points, commonalities and anything else that might separate good leads from bad ones. 
• Marketing leadership: Communicates how marketing will support sales goals; determines key initiatives, campaigns, content and assets that align with sales goals.
• Demand generation: Determines specific application of marketing goals into a set of lists, audiences, channels and tasking opportunities; builds, executes and reports on all key strategies.

Step 2: For each sales goal, gather every account you can

This could include known and unknown accounts — not people if you can help. Consider the following questions:

• Do you have access to accounts not in your database that could be interested in this product/service? 
• What accounts in your CRM have no history or engagement with this product/service but would be a fit, based on information provided by Sales?
• What accounts know about this product/service but haven’t converted into new business yet?
• What clients might be a fit for cross-serve or upsell on this service?

While all of these accounts will be in your target list, it’s important to keep them separated by where they are in the customer journey. Each list might require additional marketing touchpoints or unique messaging tailored to their journey stage. 

For convenience, you may also group these by campaigns or lists in your CRM so you can report on different success metrics that more closely align with their journey stage (e.g., increasing awareness is important for accounts that don’t know you, whereas opened opportunities are important for accounts already in the funnel). 

Step 3: Build your advertising lists

This is where an account-based marketing platform is a true friend. If you have access to a platform such as this or to a platform that can help you identify intent, this is the time to use it. Once you know all of the accounts you want to target, you may choose to build an advertising plan that looks something like this:

• All accounts: Get social media ads, regardless of intent (goal to grow intent).
• Accounts showing intent on certain keywords: Get targeted display ads by journey (to grow awareness).

Step 4: Build your email list

With the recent changes in Gmail and Yahoo! , it is critical to take this step with extra care. Above all else, your email list must only include existing records in your email system who have demonstrated some interest in this product/service through previous interactions.

You could identify such intent based on the following:

• Account and person show intent in the topic (an intent-based tool can tell you this).
• Previous campaign history (e.g., attended a webinar on said topic).
• Website page visits specific to this topic.

Consider these people eligible for one-time email campaigns, not newsletters. It’s important to send them something helpful to their day-to-day lives and that they won’t be surprised to get. 

If they convert on your offer, however, be sure to add them to an ongoing target list for people specifically interested in this product/service for the future.

Dig deeper: How to send more emails and grow your subscriber list

Step 5: Interested accounts with no known people

“Wait, can’t we pull the key buyer from something like ZoomInfo?” Technically, you could, but that doesn’t mean they are entirely sales-ready. If you know an account is interested in the topic but don’t know who is engaging, you can use a tool like content syndication to generate new conversions. 

In this example, with a helpful piece of content or a webinar targeted to their pain points, you can use your target account list to entice your key buyers to convert into your marketing funnels. This ensures you can market to the engaged person at a target account without pushing the call to sell too early in the funnel. 

Dig deeper: 5 tips for balancing ‘push’ and ‘pull’ in content marketing

Step 6: Handing off to sales

Ideally, you have created a nurture structure wherein you encourage buyers at target accounts to enter marketing nurtures specific to their needs. When they are ready to buy, you’ve created paths for them to find a contact us form, a chatbot or a person directly listed on your website. 

But what about the others? Some companies may choose to run outbound on certain accounts as well. Here’s where you can create lists to monitor for those trigger events. Those could be key happenings at a company, engagement minutes, contact scores or specific page visits. This is worth documenting — and unique to your selling team. 

By proactively separating your audiences by target profiles, you can create more specific follow-up steps (or cadences) aligned to where they are in the customer journey, how their industry talks about your product/service, and/or their pain points. Thus, your selling team’s likelihood of turning the lead into a conversation increases.

Step 7: Improve reporting

If you’re using a CRM tool, you know the challenge of the single campaign source field. It assumes a single campaign “converted” your lead into an opportunity, which is not how most buyers engage with your brand. 

Putting the accounts you wish to target into a campaign or list for future monitoring (remember Step 2?), lets you monitor which ones have had opportunities for the specific service/product you’re marketing to them. In other words, you’ll have two layers of reporting on campaign success:

• The campaign that winds up in their campaign attribution field in your CRM.
• All accounts you’ve been actively targeting — with opportunities credited even when your marketing efforts resulted in a conversion to opportunity through a non-digital channel. 

Remember, personalization is greater than the first name field, and messaging should differ along the customer’s journey. Have you tried something like this at your organization? What considerations for personalization and better targeting are you trying? 

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