No one is born an excellent B2B salesperson. Good salespeople often make things easier than it seems, but real achievement comes only to those who are constantly honing and developing their skills and doing their best to help potential customers.
The B2B sales process is a very important thing if you want to effectively generate revenue for your business. So how to build an overall and professional sales process for B2B businesses? Let’s find out together through the article below!
What is the B2B sales process?
First, you need to find out what is B2B? – B2B stands for the phrase Business To Business. Used to refer to a form of business, business or direct transaction between an enterprise and an enterprise. Accordingly, businesses will cooperate and work together to bring the most benefits and optimal efficiency.
The B2B sales process is a series of steps arranged into an iterative cycle. To shorten and standardize sales activities in a certain form. The exact number and names of the stages in the process will depend on your industry, company, and sales organization.
The formula for B2B sales between businesses and business lines may be different, but still ensure to meet the defined criteria.
Here are 7 steps of an effective B2B sales process:
- Define the customer buying process
- Identify sales stages
- Define sales goals
- Assess customer needs
- Product presentation
- End of sale
- Keep contact
7 steps guide to the standard B2B sales process for businesses
Depending on the industry and sector, the process at each company will be different. However, the standard process for B2B businesses will be built on the 7 steps below.
Step 1: Define the customer buying process
The first important step in the B2B sales process is to define the customer buying process. The customer buying process is the basis for building a B2B sales process, To determine this buying process, you need to do the following tasks:
- Identify the buyer’s buying behavior and grasp the key points in the buyer’s buying decision.
- Reconfirm with the customer the buying process built above. Confirmation can be done by calling the customer.
- Once you reconfirm with the customer, develop a detailed process. At each step of the process, describe the work that the customer does in different aspects such as external, internal, etc.
Step 2: Identify the sales stages
Once you’ve built the customer buying pipeline, move on to building the sales stages. These sales stages should correspond to the steps in the buying order developed in step 1. Take the time to review whether the stages in the customer buying process in step 1 have a purpose.
Step 3: Define sales goals
Sales goals are the results we want to achieve when we sell. Set goals for the sales team at each sales stage. This goal is not only something to be achieved but also a motivation for salespeople to try.
Quite similar to Marketing, after identifying target customers, they will deploy incentive programs, launch discount codes, and coupons to attract customers. After identifying the target customer, B2B sales staff must try to focus on selling as much as possible.
Step 4: Assess customer needs
This stage can help you get a clear understanding of the best ways to provide suppliers. To sell successfully, you need to supply goods based on the needs of potential customers.
So the first step to take is to find out what the customer needs are. The best way to do this is to ask questions. Inquiring about potential customers not only helps you identify their needs but helps them build connections, gain customer trust, even customers are likely to buy more. than.
Step 5: Product presentation
This step is extremely important in the B2B sales process to score points with customers. This stage will vary depending on your product or service and sales model. It can take the form of a face-to-face meeting or a phone or video call, or even be done via live chat.
In the previous steps, you analyzed your product, essentially a collection of product benefits, not features. Let’s talk about discount programs, give coupons for products to reach customers for the business. It is obvious that customers only care about what they get when they buy this product. But they don’t pay attention to your product. Focus on what your customers care about to sell the products they care about most.
Step 6: Closing the sale
This is when sales reps pin down exactly what the prospect wants to buy and offer a quote, offering flexible discounts to ensure the customer doesn’t come back after viewing the quote. Sales staff need to have a specific follow-up process, following up with customers to try to close the deal if they do not receive a response.
Step 7: Stay in touch
Staying in touch helps you increase your chances of successful sales. For customers to care, you need to have patience and not make them uncomfortable. This will help increase the attachment and exchange between you and the customer.
This is the last step in the B2B sales process, after-sales customer care is the way to get loyal customers, thereby helping to earn other potential customers from old customers.
B2B sales are in a state of rapid transformation. The line between inside and outside sales is blurring. Sales tools such as sales support platforms, technology software, etc. have become necessary to survive.
Conclusion
Above is an article to guide professional B2B sales skills. Hopefully, through this article, you can better understand the B2B sales process and have a better overview. Therefore, to develop according to this trend, businesses need to come up with new strategies and directions. Hope you apply successfully and have many orders every day!
