what is b2b?

The sales process to sell into businesses is different to that of selling to a consumer, as there may be more people involved in and influencing the decision to buy. This is often known as a decision making unit.

B2b sales cycles are longer than a b2c decision, as more people are involved. As companies may be buying key supplies for their business they will want to assess the quality of the product, the reliability of the supplier as well as the price.

To be successful your sales process will need to be married to their buying process, and you will need to tune into the decision making unit, their buying criteria and their real motivators in the process.

Often the buying process may include a tender, or a request to submit a proposal.

Once the decision has been made to buy, an account management plan will need to be put into place to ensure the success of the relationship, and the growth of the spend of the account.

It is essential that once a business has committed to buy from you, and a preferred supplier agreement entered into that the process does not stop there. While there may be signatures on documents at head office level, a team of people may need to be deployed to ensure that decisions taken at a local level are to use you as their supplier. A fatal flaw is that some companies sit back once the agreement has been signed – this should be when the real work begins.

As b2b relationships are often for the long term, companies often use customer relationship management systems to help manage the complexities of all the transactions that take place.

We are conducting some research in to business to business buying behaviour and you can take part by clicking here

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