B2B and B2C sales
What's the difference?

B2C simply stands for Business to Consumer sales, where companies sell their products to individuals. Think of buying a laptop from your local Apple store or insurance coverage for your car. In general, the B2C sales cycle is short. Either you buy a laptop you like on the spot, or you see your friends for a drink, discuss and go back to the store the next day. You believe that you are the sole decision-maker, even though you might be influenced by your friends and whoever you talked to that night.

B2B stands for Business to Business sales. This means that any sale of products or services is being made to a company. Think of Apple selling its computers to your business so that every single employee uses an Apple laptop. Or your company decides to buy an enterprise-level software like a CRM from Salesforce.

Firstly, let's look at B2C. When you go shopping for toothpaste, do you chose it based on the colour of packaging and its flavour, or do you bring some other analysis into your decision, such as quality of brand, price, ingredients etc? The answer is "it depends". The more people we ask this question, the more varied the answers will be. And this is the complexity of B2C, to predict consumer behaviour: it can be as rational as it can be irrational.

Now, let's look at B2B. Imagine you are working for a large international company. Your role is to purchase laptops for all the employees across Europe. How will you decide which brand to buy and at what price? Likely, you will do a very rational analysis to arrive at your final decision.

But what if your younger sister works for one of the PC providers and every day over dinner, she talks about the benefits of their brand? Your decision might be biased. In addition, what if you are not the sole decision-maker and another person, who is your rival because you are competing for the same position, is also involved? She or he, intentionally, might lobby for a different choice to yours... We can come up with so many "what if's", that suddenly the B2B purchasing decision becomes very irrational and therefore complex.

Too many B2B sales teams miss possible leads because they don't pay attention to marketing. In B2B sales, marketing might serve your sales process all the way through, from lead generation to closing a deal. It will help draw interest towards your product, build trust between you and your prospect and persuade them to make the decision.

In B2C, on the other hand, marketing, indeed, rules over sales. However, as the price of a product increases, the importance of salespeople is rising. Think of the following B2C examples:

• a construction company selling fancy apartments to retail buyers
• a business school selling an executive MBA course to potential students
• a private bank selling its services to high net worth individuals.

In all these B2C examples, the salesperson plays a key role as an advisor to a potential buyer to guide him through the decision-making journey and to close the sale.