What is B2B Sales?
Three B2B Sales Processes that will Win You More Customers

Self-service B2B sales are concerned with selling off-the-shelf cloud-based software directly to consumers, which is generally easy to implement and use. The sales approach is similar to the B2C sales process, which mainly involves self-service. However, extra steps are sometimes required to close a sale, such as getting approval from a customer's department head, from a buying authority or from the IT department.

Indeed, because prices are generally low, the budget can be approved quickly, with acquisitions taking place online without the assistance of the sales team.The process relies heavily on marketing automation. If a potential buyer recognises a need with themselves, it only takes them minutes to compare offers, read reviews, subscribe, and start using the product/service in question. To onboard new users, the freemium model might be used, where a SaaS company educates its prospects by offering free services. Canva, a visualisation platform, and Evernote, a collaboration platform, – are promoted this way. In addition, Slack or Trello use this business model by initially targeting smaller teams.

As discussed above, Slack and Trello start at the self-service level and intend to expand across organisations. The simplicity of the platform remains the same from the end user's perspective. However, the cost of the software for the whole organisation is now meaningful, and a salesperson gets involved in helping define the use case, price the service, and assist with the implementation coordination.

The majority of the time this will be carried out by insider sales (sales team that stays inside the office) who support clients over the phone. Budget approval involves a number of top-management employees from different departments. In general, these complexities slow down the sales cycle, which can last from three to six months on average. Sometimes a company will offer a free trial for a product/service in order to demonstrate its potential value to a consumer. Amazon Web Services or Stripe are other good examples of businesses that use B2B transactional sales.

At the end of the scale, enterprise B2B sales are the most complex out all of sales types; they also have the longest sales cycles, require multiple decision-makers, and the product itself requires heavy onboarding. The main sales challenge here is to identify all the relevant stakeholders, validate the value of the product or service across all departments, and orchestrate the sales process efficiently. The enterprise sales team usually consists of a number of people, such as field-sales team members and pre-sales team members.

On the one hand, field-sales is a client-facing role wherein a salesperson conducts in-person meetings with clients to learn about their needs, thereby leading the sale process. On the other hand, pre-sales generally involves highly knowledgeable product consultants, or, in some cases, product managers. Indeed, companies cannot always offer a free trial due to the complexity of implementation. In some cases, a paid pilot is conducted where the prospective customer covers any IT expenses. This sales process can be slowed down by a number of factors, which, on average, can take anywhere between six to nine months: internal politics, multiple decision-makers with different motivations and agendas, and budget commitments. SalesForce, IBM, Oracle, and SAP are companies that make use of enterprise B2B sales.