What is B2B Sales? ​

3 B2B sales processes that will win you more customers.

‘B2B sales’ is short for business-to-business sales, which involves one company selling its goods/services to another company, rather than selling them directly to consumers. Indeed, generally speaking, B2B sales are more complex, require more people, and take longer than business-to-consumer (B2C) transactions.

Two variables are responsible for defining the type of B2B software-as-a-service (SaaS) sales processes: product complexity and product price. Depending on their combination, one can distinguish between three different types of B2B SaaS sales processes: self-service, transactional, and enterprise. The chart below represents the relationship between sales models, product prices, and product complexity.

‘Complexity’ refers to three elements: the complexity of the product itself, the complexity of the implementation and the complexity of the buying decision.

‘Product price’ refers to two elements: the price level at which a purchase decision is made and the number of decision-makers involved in said decision. At the beginning of the scale, a single user is responsible for the decision. At the high end of the scale, multiple people are involved in the decision-making process, all of whom are responsible for measuring the potential impact on both budget and business productivity.

So, how do SaaS sales models deal with these dimensions?

This question can be answered according to three different elements: composition of a sales team, length of sales cycle, and customer acquisition tactics.

Let’s look at how each sales model uses the three variables to win new clients.

Self-service B2B sales are concerned with selling off-the-shelf cloud-based software directly to consumers, which is generally easy to implement and use.

The sales approach is similar to the B2C sales process, which mainly involves self-service. However, extra…