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Did you know that a staggering 91% of organizations missed their sales quota in 2023?
Many teams that fell short blamed their performance on challenging market conditions. But most admitted that their issues were caused by internal factors like:
Lack of sales skills or experience
Misaligned sales activities
Poor time management
This tells us that more sales teams should be hitting quota — they just need to sort out their processes (and hire the right people).
Wondering how to level up your B2B sales operation to deliver better client results? You’re in the right place. In this article, we’ll discuss everything you need to know about B2B sales, including examples, growth strategies, and metrics to track.
Let’s get into it…
What Is B2B Sales?
B2B stands for “business to business”.
As the name suggests, B2B sales involve transactions between two businesses: the vendor and the buyer.
Because B2B sales typically affect an entire organization rather than an individual user, they tend to have higher transaction values than business-to-consumer (B2C) sales. This, in turn, means they’re often more complex — involving more stakeholders and longer buying cycles.
4 B2B Sales Examples
The phrase “B2B” covers a wide range of business types. Here are the most common examples of B2B sales:
1. B2B SaaS
Software-as-a-service (SaaS) is one of the most popular B2B product categories.
In SaaS sales, the vendor offers access to their application software while handling all the associated hardware resources. So buyers get the functionality they require, without having to worry about expensive physical infrastructure purchases.
SaaS products come in all shapes and sizes. But some of the most common use cases include:
Sales and marketing automation
Enterprise resource planning
Financial planning and analysis
Project management
HR
SaaS is a huge market, with global sales expected to surpass $295 billion in 2025 — more than double their value in 2021.
2. Manufacturing
While SaaS is all about selling a digital service, manufacturing involves creating physical products from raw materials or components, covering everything from paper to plastics to printers.
In a B2B context, these products are typically produced at a large scale using machinery.
There are two distinct types of B2B manufacturing sales:
Selling directly to an end user
Selling via a third-party intermediary, such as a wholesaler or distributor
Again, manufacturing is a massive market, with its total value forecast to reach $22.56 trillion by 2030.
3. Professional Services
Professional services firms “sell” their skills to other businesses, helping their customers to achieve specific goals. Common examples of B2B professional services include:
Accounting
Architectural design
Digital marketing
Language translation
Legal services
Globally, revenue in the professional services industry is set to hit $72.61 billion in 2024, with almost half of this amount being generated in the US.
4. Wholesale Distribution
Wholesale distributors are intermediaries that bulk-purchase products from a manufacturer, then resell them to retailers in smaller volumes and at a higher price point. You can find B2B wholesalers in most product categories, from fashion and beauty to office supplies and hardware.
Given the wide range of businesses that buy from wholesalers, the global market is expected to be worth more than $68 trillion by 2028.
B2B Sales vs B2C Sales: What's the Difference?
You might be thinking: “Sales is sales.”
But B2B and B2C are totally different beasts. Let’s examine the main differences between the two:
1. Transaction Size
B2B sales tend to involve much larger transaction values than their B2C alternatives.
Whether a business buys physical products, software, or professional services, they often carry a substantial price tag. Indeed, 71% of B2B buyers are prepared to spend over $50,000 in a single self-serve transaction, while 27% would shell out $500,000+.
Sure, some B2C transactions run to tens of thousands of dollars. But the vast majority are far smaller.
2. Number of Buyers
When you’re shopping for yourself, you might seek a second opinion on higher-value or more unusual purchases (like when you’re not sure you can pull off dungarees).
But for the most part, you’re happy to go it alone. After all, you’re the one spending the money.
Clearly, things are different in the world of B2B sales. If you’re buying on behalf of an entire business, the product or service might be used by dozens — or hundreds, or even thousands — of people across different locations and teams.
The final buying decision might be taken by an individual, like the CEO or the head of a department. But multiple stakeholders contribute to that decision, with Gartner revealing the typical buying group for a complex B2B solution is made up of six to 10 decision-makers.
3. Sales Cycle Length
Because B2B sales involve high transaction volumes and large buying teams, they invariably have far longer sales cycles than B2C purchases.
Per Databox, the median time to close a B2B deal stands at 2.1 months:
But with approximately one-quarter of sales cycles lasting for 3+ months, it’s clear that many B2B transactions take significantly longer.
4. Education Level
The stakes are high in B2B sales.
If a business invests in the wrong software tool or professional services firm, it could end up wasting massive sums of money — not just on the cost of the original purchase, but on all the unnecessary training and onboarding required to start using it.
And then they have to do it all again to find an adequate replacement.
Because of the risks of a bad purchase, buyers spend plenty of time educating themselves before reaching a buying decision.
In fact, 62% of B2B buyers engage with three to seven pieces of content before connecting with a salesperson, while 11% consume even more.
So it’s fair to say they’re better educated than the average B2C buyer. You certainly don’t get many impulse purchases in B2B!
5. Sales Methodology
Because of all the differences we’ve highlighted, B2B sales require a totally different methodology from B2C.
The average B2B buyer will have a ton of questions before they’re ready to commit. It’s up to sales reps to provide all the necessary information, which might involve multiple emails, phone calls, and face-to-face meetings.
On the flip side, the higher transaction values mean B2B reps can afford to spend way longer finding prospects and nurturing them into leads on behalf of their clients.
5 B2B Sales and Marketing Strategies To Grow Your Bottom Line
Ready to drive better results for your B2B clients? Try these strategies for size:
1. Cold Outreach
Cold outreach involves identifying prospects who match your client’s ICP and contacting them via one or more communication channels.
Done well, cold outreach is a highly persuasive, scalable way to generate leads.
That’s why sales professionals rate phone calls, email, and social media — all key elements of cold outreach campaigns — among the most effective sales channels:
But efficient, scalable, high-performing cold outreach requires the right tools for the job.
Specifically, you need an outreach platform that lets you:
Build automated campaigns spanning multiple channels
Boost results by maintaining high deliverability
Personalize your outreach to improve open and response rates
Scale campaigns by adding new inboxes
Try out new messaging with A-Z tests
Track results with advanced analytics tools
QuickMail does all that stuff (and more besides). Find out more in our case study: Scaling to 200 Cold Outreach Clients.
2. Account-Based Sales and Marketing
Account-based marketing (ABM) involves tracking down a small number of highly valuable accounts and prospects, and focusing all your resources on selling to them. It’s extremely labor-intensive, but it results in super-personalized messaging that’s more likely to engage and convert.
Unless your clients are target enterprise-level customers, ABM probably isn’t an option — the effort will outweigh the potential rewards.
But for the right sort of organization, the account-based approach delivers impressive results.
That’s why ABM was named the #1 B2B marketing priority for 2023, while 66% of businesses plan to increase their ABM spending in 2024.
Like the sound of account-based marketing? Check out our guide: 8 Account-Based Marketing Tools To Get More Leads.
3. Content Marketing
Content marketing isn’t a standalone B2B sales strategy.
Rather, it’s a way to level up results across other strategies by creating and sharing engaging, persuasive content that speaks to your prospects’ needs and pain points.
For example, you might share case studies, testimonials, and other content assets as part of a cold outreach sequence. Or use a piece of content as the “hook” for a paid ad campaign, like in this example from digital badging and certificate platform Accredible:
As we’ve noted, most B2B buyers want to read a bunch of content before they’re prepared to speak with a salesperson.
If you can’t provide them with that content, they’ll look elsewhere.
4. Social Selling
Social selling involves finding and building relationships with prospects on social media.
From a B2B perspective, the majority of social selling takes place on a single platform: LinkedIn.
It’s easy to see why, with LinkedIn data revealing that:
Four-fifths of LinkedIn users are responsible for driving business decisions
LinkedIn audiences have double the buying power of the average web user
LinkedIn users are 6X more likely to convert than the average web audience
Like any form of cold outreach, social selling is only effective if you invest in the necessary tools. Otherwise, you’ll be relying on manually messaging individual prospects, which simply isn’t scalable.
That’s why QuickMail lets you add LinkedIn steps to your outreach campaigns.
You can even view a prospect’s profile, send a connection request, then follow up via cold email — all in the same sequence.
Learn more: LinkedIn Prospecting: The Ultimate Guide for Generating Leads
5. Customer Referrals
B2B buyers crave accurate information to guide their purchase decisions.
And when it comes to finding trustworthy information, 90% of buyers turn to peers in their industry.
(For context, just 29% of B2B buyers say they trust salespeople from vendors, making them the least-trusted source of information — behind social media influencers and national media.)
What does this mean?
It’s simple: you can use your clients’ existing customers to generate more leads and sales by asking for referrals.
And if they won’t give you a referral, they might still write you a review. This is super valuable too, with 54% of technology buyers using them to inform purchase decisions:
B2B Sales Metrics You Should Be Tracking
How do you know if you’ve built an effective B2B sales operation? It’s all about tracking your performance against the following key metrics:
| Metric | What does it track? |
|---|---|
| Total sales | The total amount of revenue generated from sales activities over a given period. |
| Sales by product/type | Total revenue, segmented across each product, service, or category you sell. |
| Sales from new business | Total revenue generated from sales to new customers. |
| Total leads | The number of leads generated within a given period. |
| Leads by source | Total leads, segmented by source (e.g. email, social media, cold calling, etc). |
| Conversion rate | The proportion of users who complete a desired action, like requesting a demo or booking a meeting. |
| Conversion rate by source | Your conversion rates for each individual sales channel you use. |
| Annual contract value (ACV) | The average value of customer contracts over a year. |
| Customer lifetime value (CLV) | How much the average customer spends with your business over the span of their contract, including upsells, cross-sells, and renewals. |
Learn more: The Complete Guide to Cold Email Metrics
Reach, Engage and Convert B2B Buyers With QuickMail
There’s no real mystery to building a successful B2B sales function.
Rather, it’s about identifying the most effective strategies for reaching and engaging your clients’ ideal customers — then investing in automation tools to scale your operation.
If cold outreach is a key element of your sales process, QuickMail is the perfect fit.
With our platform, you can build automated, multi-channel campaigns spanning email, LinkedIn, SMS, and cold calling.
Because we built QuickMail for lead generation agencies, we make it easy to navigate between profiles. And you can give each client unique integrations, prospects, exclude lists, and more.
See for yourself by signing up for your free QuickMail trial!
