4 B2B Sales Business Plans To Find More Customers and Revenue

Sales can be hard to find if you do not have the right B2B sales business plan and the appropriate strategy for finding business growth.

This is because B2B sales is a transaction that requires intricate sales strategies to get more qualified leads to keep your sales pipeline healthy or convince all parties involved in the business-to-business deals.

Hence in this article as one of the leading vendors of easy to use CRM software tools, let us share with you four tied strategies that have helped many of our customers overcome their challenges and stay on the top of the game using B2B sales business plans which can bring more customers and revenue.

Business Plan #1

Strategic selling

Strategic selling is a tactic that can help businesses to win complex deals with an insight-driven and scalable approach which was first introduced by the Miller Heiman Group.

The fundamental approach to this type of selling lies in being able to identify different points of contact for the company that you are prospecting, which can be based on the influence on your B2B sales process, where after you need to determine the level of support these contacts can offer during the decision making at the prospect company.

For example, imagine a situation whereby you want to sell a business growth technology software for project management and automation tool to a firm.

In this case, your first point of contact could be the marketing manager or the operations manager, who has been looking for a productivity tool to increase the team’s efficiency while at work.

Now having connected them, you might find that that the marketing manager of the company is the right fit to promote the introduction of your software in the firm a.k.a. “coach” while the manager for operations is the one who will decide and make the final decision, a.k.a. “economic buyer” and so place your value proposition accordingly to the marketing department’s need during your outreach and so this way can begin a conversation on a meaningful ground.

After this you can provide the manager for marketing with the type of information and data required to convince the manager of operations or make sure that you get a meeting with both these two managers together, perhaps also accompanied by the IT manager in the company, who will be the “technical buyer” and thereafter with the aid of the marketing manager, ensure that the IT manager provides his/her approval and finally the operations manager signs off the deal.  That is strategic selling.

Business Plan #2

Solution selling

This second type of B2B sales business plan as the name suggests focuses more on the requirement of the prospective B2B customer than it does on the actual product sales process during the sale.

To explain it more precisely, in solution selling the salesperson focuses more on helping to identify and dragonize the needs of the prospect along with their challenges and goals.

After this, the salesperson recommends the product or service that can help them to overcome these challenges.

Now, this type of selling tactic is most useful when your company offers customized solutions to its target B2B market.

For example, if your company sells a cloud-based easy to use CRM primarily you need to research the prospect’s pain points and the solution they have been looking for, thereafter ask the prospect open-ended questions and find whether the prospect fits your businesses’ ideal customer personas, the educate the prospect so that they qualify for the solution that you offer and provide them with a tailored solution based on their needs ( along with case-studies) and finally negotiate the terms and close the deal.

Business Plan #3

Account-Based Selling

According to predictions stated by Gartner, this sale tactic among all other B2B sales business plans would be adopted by more than 75% of B2B companies by 2021.

Now, account-based selling is all about treating every account in your B2B sales pipeline as a market of one and so includes a multi-channel and multi-touch strategy, executed across the company, to establish contact with several stakeholders at the prospect’s firm.

Looking for an example?

Let us imagine you are selling a solution for service management to a logistics company.

Firstly for this type of selling you need to list down all the logistic companies that your business offers its solutions and thereafter based on the selection criteria you need to recognize your present prospective customer. Next, you need to delve into the data and perform research on the common challenges the previously mentioned companies face across various processes on multiple levels, recognize the key influences and decision-makers of your prospect’s company, tailor your value propositions with different variations to address the challenges and goals of the different stakeholders in the prospect’s firm and finally reach out to all the stakeholders you have identified to begin a conversation for finalizing the deal.

Typically, account-based selling is best suited for businesses that have lengthier sales cycles, complex sales interactions that require the approval of several decision-makers and have a higher chance of up-selling and cross-selling in their targeted marketplace.

Business Plan #4

Social Selling

According to Forrester Research, more than 68% of the B2B consumers conduct research for the solution they require on search engines and multiple social media platforms.

Now, social selling focuses on the latter whereby you primarily need to establish your business in the defined target markets and then focus on building relationships with your prospect’s company leveraging social media networks like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and others to share appropriate and relevant contents in order to engage the potential customer or nurture the existing ones.

Now the vital dissimilarity between social selling and the other B2B sales business plans which we have discussed before is that while the former selling tactics focus on building a one-onto-one relationship with the prospects across these social channels the latter kind of marketing is all about broadcasting messages from one to many.

For example, let us take a look at how one of the co-founders of our partnering companies uses LinkedIn.

With a profile optimized to discuss clearly what our company is building, which is CRM for small and medium businesses, our above-mentioned partnering company networks with social influencers on a pre-understood footing a thereafter add “Making easy to use CRM human” to his profile tagline which creates a conversation-starter.
Next, he shares sales-related content actively with his network to generate discussion around this topic, whereby the goal is not to directly sell, but more focused on building contextual relationships.

In other words, the goal over here in this B2B sales business plan is to be able to establish ourselves as experts in the industry who wants to have a conversation with businesses, and not just sell to them, since the better the conversations, the higher the number of conversions.

Therefore in social selling by promoting content that is relevant to the prospective buyers across the channels that they remain most active on the salespersons are more likely to have profound conversations with prospects about things that they really take care of.

Moreover, this type of selling even helps to keep a watch on the competitors in the marketplace and find how they are approaching the target markets or how many people interact with them and what their customers are saying about your competitor’s company.

Conclusion

Now if you are eager to know which of these B2B sales business plans and strategies you should use, the answer is: to each his own.

This is because not every B2B sales tactic is suitable for every business.

Hence even before you choose a strategy to implement for your company, look into your current sales process, define your target markets, find which mode of engagement they prefer, how long you can afford a sales-cycle to be, how many decision-makers are typically involved, and lastly the resources available to you before selecting your sales business plan.