Your B2B Sales Engine: The 3 Things You Need
To build a great business, you need a great sales engine. That is, a way to reliably bring in business. So how do we build that? What do we need?
1. Understanding How B2B Sales Work
The first thing we need is to understand a bit about how B2B sales work.
There are some differences between selling to consumers, B2C sales, and selling to businesses, B2B Sales. Understanding these differences and how to get started, is the first thing we need to build our sales engine.
This includes understanding a simple B2B Sales Process and finding one that works for you and your business.
B2B sales are typically larger and have longer sales cycles. This means that there is more to do once we get that initial lead. There will likely be more than one person involved in making the decision to buy. Having a simple sales process helps to keep yourself on track and moving forward.
2. Sales Skills
Once we understand how things work, we need some basic B2B Sales Skills.
This helps us to know:
🎯 what to do when we are at a networking event
🎯 what to do when we get our first meeting
🎯what questions to ask and how to frame them
🎯 how to guide conversations.
Having some basic sales skills helps to build your confidence when you are out there having conversations.
👉🏽 We learn how to focus on the customer’s challenge, and to guide them to open up and talk about it, so that you can help solve it.
👉🏽 We understand how to qualify opportunities, so that we don’t waste time in the wrong conversations.
👉🏽 We learn how to capture the information we need in discovery, how to use that to shape our suggested solution.
👉🏽 We learn how to present our suggested solution and how to draw out objections.
👉🏽 We learn how to shape proposals, keep moving forward, and to close opportunities with a positive outcome for our customer and for us.
3. Tools to Support you
Once we have some basic B2B sales skills, we need B2B sales tools to support us. We often think of sales tools as information that we share with a customer, but actually, the most important tools are support our own actions at each step of the process.
A good set of basic sales tools includes:
👉🏽 Qualification Questions: A set of questions to ask a prospect, to ensure they are a good potential customer for you.
👉🏽 Discovery Questions: A set of questions you ask to capture all fo the information you need to shape a great solution. This also includes questions about the customer’s buying process, and who the key decision makers are.
👉🏽 Presentation Template: A simple presentation template, that you can use to present and talk to a suggested solution. If you have a technical product, this could include a demo.
👉🏽 Objection Handling Cheatsheet: A set of commonly asked questions, and your answers. This would include objections that customers raise, that is things that may potentially stop your opportunity moving forward.
👉🏽 Proposal Template: A simple proposal template, to summarise everything that has been agreed for final approval.
In addition to having tools to support you through the sales process, it also helps to have some simple tools to help you keep track of your opportunities, and forecast your sales. You can do this with:
📈 Pipeline Tracker: A simple spreadsheet keeping track of your sales opportunities. This will suffice until you are ready to start using a CRM to track sales opportunities.
📈 Forecast Template: A simple spreadsheet to help you get a picture of what will close when, and track that forecast against your own sales target.
None of these things require sophisticated tools or software. I suggest you start simple – you can always add automation later.
Is that all I need?
To get started – yes that is all you need. All of these things are easy to get started with.
To get started selling B2B, all you need to do is start having conversations. As you learn more, you can refine your approach and your efforts, to become more effective.
What about automation?
Automation – especially with what we can now do with AI – is great. We absolutely want to start building in smarts and automation where we can.
However, to ensure that our automation works well, we need to keep the right mix of human touch and connection with our customers.
We also want to ensure we have a good handle on the sales basics, so that we are clear on what that mix should be.
A good place to start with automation is for lead generation. In addition to a good sales engine, a strong B2B business will have marketing bringing in leads for you to follow up on.
When you are starting out, you may not yet have the budget to invest in marketing and automation. You may also be still getting a handle on what works for you and your business.
Remember – you can actually just go out there and talk to people. You don’t need to invest a lot of money upfront to get started. Keep it simple to start – and build from there.
The Missing Piece: Practice
To learn to sell, you need to get out there and have a go. Sales is not something you learn from theory – is it a skill, like playing basketball, that you need to practice.
Every time you have a conversation, you will be able to practice your skills.
Take a step back after each call or meeting – and have a think about what you could do to improve. You’ll notice yourself improving over time – something you can continue to do for the rest of your career.
The 3 Parts to your Sales Engine
So don’t over complicate it. Build your confidence by working on:
1. Understanding B2B Sales
2. Building your B2B Sales Skills
3. Building your B2B Sales Tools
Then get out there and have some conversations.
