A B2B Sales Guide: How To Successfully Sell Your B2B Services

Home Guides A B2B Sales Guide: How To Successfully Sell Your B2B Services

March 1, 2021 March 1, 2021 / By Tooba Nadeem

Since spending on B2B services is about to increase in the next year by 20%, you simply can’t afford to stay behind. We believe you’ll have to prepare a lot to take a constructive B2B service/product sales approach.

But the main question is, how to prepare for it ? Well , we don’t want to petrify you, but selling B2B products and services to other businesses is quite tricky. It’s pretty much more challenging than selling directly to consumers. If you’re unable to attack a situation in the right way, then no one can save you from disruption.

But don’t you worry because you have landed in the right place. Today in this guide we will discuss in detail what B2B services are and how can you efficiently sell your B2B services.

So let’s get started!

What are B2B services?

B2B services, or business-to-business services, are primarily transactions of services between two businesses instead of from business to end customers. If compared to B2C, B2B sales deals often have longer sales cycles and higher dollar values.

If done well, the sales of your B2B services are more likely to be deeply rewarding and lucrative. Being a B2B service expert, it’s crucial to build a sales process that works perfectly for your business, objectives, and prospects.

How to successfully sell your B2B services?

Selling B2B services isn’t a simple task as you’re not selling to individuals who are just making purchase decisions for themselves. It definitely requires comprehensive planning as a lot of people are involved in this process.

Usually B2B service sales follow a sales funnel that calls for careful and thorough planning, engagement, and closing.

Now let’s walk you through the process through which you can successfully sell your B2B services.

Conduct market research

Begin your sales process by conducting market research to understand and identify the demand for your offering. You need to first figure out who your targeted customers are. Conducting high-level market research may be time-consuming and tough but it’s essential to find out the right audience for your B2B services.

Start your research by identifying your competitors first. Then familiarize yourself with their strategies and techniques to comprehend what solutions your prospects are being offered from other sources.

Once you have identified your right audience and your competitors, start compiling an identity , including foundation dates, business demographics, culture, business type, pain points, and financial situation.

After completing the research, contact them. Whether via events, calls, or emails, just make sure to create an embarking first impression that mainly focuses on your prospect’s needs. Apart from educating them about your business, you should be offering solutions for their pain points.

We strongly suggest to avoid focusing on cold connections when you connect with the warmth of business friendships. Treat your prospects very carefully and smartly, create a positive experience to turn them into your loyal customers.

Qualify leads

Once you have completed your research and contacted your potential prospects, it’s high-time to determine whether they’re qualified leads. To confirm that there is a full-fledged opportunity to make a sale, you first need to ask them the following questions:

What is the problem they’re trying to fix or want to get fixed? – Asking this question from your prospect will help you in determining what service(s) you should recommend to them as the sale process progresses.

Have they tried to get the problem fixed before? – If the answer is yes, ask them why the previous solution didn’t work for them. This will help you in understanding what solution will work and won’t work. Also, you’ll be able to exactly know about their pain points to identify if your service can solve their problem or not.

Who makes the final purchasing decision? In the B2C industry, you’re directly selling your consumer. However in B2B you have to work with various points of contact to close your deal. So it’s essential to find out who these people are.

Qualifying leads is an essential part of the B2B sales process as it helps you rank your potential customers on the readiness of purchasing, and split your time and efforts amongst them.

Please make sure that you have a sound system to record and keep track of all your customer data and their position in the sales funnel process. We believe you don’t want to lose a big deal just because you forget to take a follow-up or lose their contact details. Having a stellar CRM system will make this sales journey easier.

Meet face-to-face

It might sound a little bit odd when the deadly virus is still around us but we strongly suggest to avoid selling your B2B services over a phone call. Why so? Because you’re unable to efficiently sell your services to them in that way. If you have the great opportunity to meet your potential customer face-to-face, don’t waste time just avail it.

The key to a successful meeting is to prepare thoroughly and carefully. Before presenting your solution(s), pre-run them in your mind and make brief notes of your conversation. When looking at a B2B service sales pitch, we suggest you to work within this flow:

Introduce your business and yourself

Explain your potential customer’s pain points and their impacts

Propose your solution and time frame

Explain why & how you’re different from your competitors

Set up your pricing strategy

Summarize and review your focal points

Pre-planning your meeting will help you in communicating your unique thoughts and selling points better than just extemporizing it and sprinting to close the deal!

Close the deal

As your service sale comes to close, it doesn’t mean your work is done. If you have made a sale, well congratulations! Now it’s high time to start preparing a document (agreement) outlining your business terms and conditions.

Besides, you must also coordinate with your company’s customer care & service department to ensure that your customer is onboarded.

Unfortunately if all your hard work goes in vain, don’t worry! Thank your prospect for their valuable time and request them to keep in touch with you to solve any pain points they may have in future. Sometimes a ‘no’ means ‘not right now’, it will help you in gaining useful insights that may support your future service sales.

Track results to improve

We believe a high-performance sales team constantly measures the results to improve their processes. When you’re frequently measuring your results to efficiently improve your B2B service sales metrics, your team and you can boost the overall performance and productivity.

The key metrics your B2B sales service team must be tracking include:

Sales Productivity Metrics – Measuring the productivity of your sales representatives will help in identifying the gaps in your process which might be costing you sales.

Average Lead Response Time – Even a single minute matters in B2B sales. The sooner you respond to your prospect’s queries, the more likely you are going to make a sale. Therefore, it’s highly essential to track the average lead response time metric.

Conversion Metrics Analyzing Marketing Qualified to Sales Qualified Leads – This metric analyzes which leads have converted through marketing efforts. While it’s useful for marketers, it’s also a good tool for sales leads.

Closed won/lost opportunities – This metric helps in tracking how many deals you have total closed or won, vs the closed-lost opportunities as it can help you determine your overall success percentage.

The bottom line

Clients like to buy, but they don’t like when they’re being sold. Instead, they appreciate being helped by a professional and trusted advisor whose primary aim should be to understand the pain points of it’s prospect.

Ask your prospects what they’re looking for and then listen to them very carefully to understand what actually they want. Opting a consultative approach will definitely bring in more sales.

We hope this guide will help you in understanding how you can successfully sell your B2B services.

Just remember, don’t be a kiosk salesperson, become a helpful B2B consultant if you really want to make big sales.

Tooba Nadeem

Tooba Nadeem is an experienced technical writer with 5 years of expertise in technical writing. Her extensive research and knowledge enable her to provide comprehensive insights into various interesting topics. She excels at presenting complex information in simplified language, ensuring clarity for the audience.