B2B Sales Process: Everything You Need to Know

In this guide, we’ll walk you through a 9-stage B2B sales process to close more deals.

We’ll also provide you with actionable tips on how to improve every stage of the sales process.

What Is The B2B Sales Process?

The B2B sales process is a structured series of steps that salespeople and organizations follow to generate leads, pitch them their solutions, and convert them to paying customers.

That sales process is not just general sales best practices, but rather a well-defined process that is scalable, repeatable, and coachable to new sales reps.

💡 To improve efficiency and ensure consistency across all sales development representatives, the sales process is typically documented with each step outlined so everyone in the team knows their tasks and responsibilities.

The goals of the B2B sales process are to:

• Find qualified prospects that you can pitch your solution to.
• Pitch your solution while learning about your prospects’ pain points, and handling objections around features and price.
• Build relationships with your prospects, including all key decision-makers in their business.
• Ultimately, close the deal and win more revenue for your organization.

➡️ The sales process should be adaptable, so your sales reps can deal with clients from different industries and requirements to provide them with a tailored solution.

Why Is The B2B Sales Process So Long?

The reason why the B2B sales process takes so much time is that there can be many decision-makers involved and the fact that buyers want to evaluate multiple options before committing to one.

As a result, the sales process can take up to a few months.

Unlike in the B2C sales process where consumers often decide on the same or the next day, the enterprise sales process has different buying behavior.

Organizations usually want to learn more about the product, do due diligence, and get approval from the budget holders.

➡️ B2B buyers want to familiarize themselves with case studies, use cases per industry, the credibility of your solution, and conduct a cost-benefit analysis.

Why Is The B2B Sales Process Important?

The B2B sales process is an important part of your sales strategy because it provides a structured framework that guides your sales team on how to convert leads into paying clients.

Here are some of the benefits of having a defined B2B sales process:

• You can educate and train your junior salespeople and onboard new sales reps into your sales process.
• The standardization of the sales process will ensure that your sales reps are following pre-defined steps, reducing the likelihood of missing steps (e.g., following up after a discovery call).
• Improve sales rep productivity in the long run, since your team will adapt to the sales process.
• Forecasting and risk identification become easier, as sales leaders can identify bottlenecks and provide guidance on how to deal with risky deals.
• Being data-driven about each stage of the buying process will enable you to identify and adjust aspects of the strategy where you are losing clients.

What Are The Stages In The B2B Sales Process? The 9-Stage Process

Now that we discussed what the B2B sales process is and why it’s important, we’ll walk you through the traditional 9-stage sales process to secure high-ticket deals.

Here’s a quick overview of how it looks like: 👇

#1: Prospecting (Pre-Qualifying)

The first stage of the B2B sales process is prospecting and pre-qualifying leads that your brand can target for outreach.

It is the stage where your sales are identifying potential customers using information from your ideal customer persona (ICP) to pre-qualify leads.

The process includes:

• Identifying potential leads that fit your criteria and that you know your solution can be useful for them.
• Researching their company, and industry, and pre-qualifying them based on how much they fit into your ideal customer persona.
• Creating a targeted list of prospects to focus on during the outreach phase of the sales process.

How To Find & Pre-Qualify Prospects

To identify leads and create targeted leads, there are sales platforms that you can use to help you with that, including LinkedIn Sales Navigator and Warmly.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator lets you find decision-makers of any company with the tool’s advanced filters for company size, seniority level, and location.

On the other hand, tools like Warmly help you identify website visitors and then enrich them with relevant company information.

That will enable you to identify high-intent leads who have visited your website, pinpointing the exact stakeholders evaluating your solution.

#2: Outreach & Qualifying

After you’ve created your target list of potential leads to go after, it’s time to start reaching out to them.

Sales reps usually initiate contact through cold emails, cold calling, and social media to introduce themselves, their solution, and why their offer is a good fit for their business.

💡 During the outreach phase, you still want to ask qualifying questions to better understand the prospects’ needs and get a sense of their budget.

For example, you can ask the prospects open-ended questions, such as what are their current problems and what are their current solutions to resolving these problems.

After they’ve outlined their problems you can start formulating your unique selling proposition and how your solution can help them resolve their issue.

Outreach Tips

First of all, you should not be spending too much time on lower-quality leads. 

If the prospect you are talking to on the phone is evading the topic and sounds like they want to hang up, your team should not be forcing the conversation to continue.

Secondly, you can utilize a lead scoring system to prioritize leads.

➡️ Lead scoring is an objective ranking that takes into account your prospects’ profession, the industry that they operate in, company size, and company revenue.

Cold outreach is usually ended with a call-to-action to schedule a more in-depth conversation where you can walk them through your solution in greater detail.

And finally, you can use the sales methodology BANT, which stands for:

• Budget: How much budget does your client seem to have and how much would they be willing to pay for it?
• Authority: Identifying the key decision-makers in the deal.
• Need: Find out if this prospect has a real need for your solution.
• Time Frame: A possible timeline of when the lead plans to roll out your solution.

Image from HubSpot.

#3: Pitching (Discovery Call)

After your sales team has secured a meeting with a prospect, it’s time to prepare for the meeting with how your solution can work out for their use case.

Here’s what pitching looks like for the different B2B companies:

• Salespeople of SaaS platforms would be prepared with interactive product demos and an overview of the platform. If it’s for enterprise clients, they’ll be also looking to provide a tailored solution for onboarding and account management.
• Salespeople of consulting companies and agencies would be prepared with a custom pitch deck that outlines the current competitor landscape, and industry trends, and helps the prospect better understand their workflow.

During the discovery session, you want to dive deeper into your customers’ pain points and see how your solution can be of value to them.

Pitching Tips

You can use digital sales room software like Arrows (that’s us) during the pitching phase to create a personalized room for your prospect and consolidate all of your sales collateral in one place.

Your sales team can move beyond generic content with a personalized buying experience that addresses your prospects’ unique needs and goals.

Arrows sales rooms allow you to equip champions with perfectly packaged information they can confidently share with their internal teams.

Here are some of the core features of Arrows sales rooms to help you close more high-value deals:

• Engagement activity sync back into your HubSpot account in real-time, including creating and associating new contacts discovered with the deal in the CRM.
• Real-time alerts of when tasks are completed or when your clients ask questions in the sales funnel.

• Resource sharing: Unify all resources and data about each lead.
• Next meeting sync: A component that stays up-to-date in real-time based on your next scheduled meeting in the CRM.
• Tracking buyer engagement to see which leads view the sales rooms in real-time.

💡 Our users are achieving a 44% higher win rate with our digital sales rooms than the average win rate for deals over the last 12 months.

Your sales team can control the narrative, build momentum, and secure more deals.

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To help you tailor the sales rooms to your leads, Arrows lets you customize the room’s content based on your prospect’s needs and HubSpot data.

❗Note: Arrows was built for teams that run on HubSpot.

#4: Following Up

Even if your leads have appeared to be interested in your solution, they might be slow to respond to your emails and hesitant to book another meeting.

This is why following up is an important aspect of a B2B sales process.

Following up includes reaching out to your prospects to see what they think about your solution and if they’ve had enough time to think about it.

How Often Should You Follow Up?

As Research from Invesp found that 80% of successful sales take five or more follow-up calls, sales experts like Sabri Suby have learned to ‘’follow up like a madman’’.

In its video explaining how to follow up on leads, Sabri goes on to explain that he would pick up the phone once every 2-3 days and call prospects to check on them.

In this way, the expert claims that you can stay top-of-mind with your prospects even if they are shopping for other alternatives and solutions.

#5: Relationship Building With All Decision-Makers

The next step in the B2B sales process is to build a relationship (rapport) with your prospect.

Not just transactional relationships, but trying to connect with them on a more personal level.

Keep in mind that they might not be the final decision-maker of the deal and that you might need to get to know other stakeholders in their organization.

In our guide on how to close more high ticket sales, one of our tips was building a relationship with all decision-makers.

💡 As research from Gartner shows in complex B2B deals there can be 6 to 10 decision-makers, you want to solidify the deal by nurturing a relationship with all key stakeholders in the organization.

How To Build Relationships With Your Prospects

You can build relationships with your leads by:

• Actively listening to the problems that they are facing.
• Understanding their pain points and what direction they want to go with their organization.
• Meeting with them in person.
• (Optional) Sending them physical gifts that are personalized to them.

#6: Objection Handling

During the negotiation phase where you have identified your customers’ problems and they have become aware of your solution, there might be a couple of objections that you will face.

It is very rarely the case that your prospects agree 100% with your offer and buy on the spot.

Objections can be in the form of:

• Price: Prospects might like your solution but they do not feel confident that this price will get approved by their senior management.
• Competitors: If your leads have done their homework, they will be asking your sales reps questions related to how your solution is different from your competitors.
• Solution-related objections: If your prospects have been in the industry for a while and have experimented with different solutions like yours in the past, they might come up with stories of how they tried your solution in the past and it did not work.

In cases like this, it’s important to have a sales process for dealing with different kinds of objections.

How To Handle Objections

The sales leader Chris Orlob has a framework that is taught in his company for successful objection handling of any sort:

Chris’ formula includes speaking calmly with authority, clarifying the objection, validating the objection, and offering a solution to that objection that reframes the problem into an opportunity.

And here are some other objection-handling tips:

• Prepare your existing and new sales reps with common sales objections with pre-determined responses.
• Use social proof, such as case studies and testimonials, to battle objections related to your competitors or the credibility of your solution.
• For pricing objections, you can offer trial periods or a money-back guarantee scenario to move the deal forward.

#7: Closing

Now that you’ve built rapport with your lead, handled all of their objections, and taken care of all of their follow-up questions, it’s time to close the deal.

Since you’ve demonstrated the value of your product or service and educated your prospect on how your solution works, there’s no need to go over features all over again.

At this stage, you want to:

• Discuss the next steps of your offer if they accept the deal.
• Negotiate the final terms of the contract. Your sales team must be aware of what kind of discounts they can give to secure the deal.
• Finalize the contract with a custom pricing model that works for their business and send it to them.
• Get the final sign-off from their final decision-maker.

Closing Tips

💡 To make sure that there are no bottlenecks in the contract signing process, discuss with the prospect who are the stakeholders who will make the final decision and by when you should know their answer.

After you’ve sent over your tailored offer and an explanation of the next steps, your prospects might take some time to think about the deal.

➡️ The days after you have sent your personalized proposal are important since your clients can decide in the final moment that they will go with another competitor.

This is why your team can include a follow-up in your B2B sales strategy after the close to create excitement about signing with you.

For example, you might send them a detailed product walkthrough that is reserved only for clients, or any other interesting or helpful information around your solution.

Here are some other closing tips that you can use in your B2B sales process:

• You can use scarcity and urgency to your advantage, such as using a limited-time offer or price discounts to make a decision quicker.
• Provide detailed next steps on how the solution will be implemented for their need and how they will be onboarded.
• Send tailored proposals using sales proposal software like Proposify that includes elements, such as interactive pricing tables so clients can customize their pricing.

#8: Nurturing

After your sales team has won the deal and your prospects have signed the contract – this is not where it ends.

Professional salespeople know that it’s important to check in with your prospects, who are currently with customer success by now, to see how well your solution fits into their organization.

It can be in the form of asking if your customers are facing struggles with learning how to use the product or if they are seeing the promised results with your company’s service.

💡 This would allow you to build long-term relationships with your prospects and prepare you for the next step of the sales process.

(Bonus) #9: Asking For Referrals

The best source of new clients is through referrals of happy existing customers.

A bonus part that you can include in your B2B sales process is to continue nurturing relationships with your clients so you can ask them for referrals.

When Is The Best Time To Ask For A Referral?

The best time to ask for a referral is when they are the most excited about your product or services and results are finally starting to kick in for them.

Here’s a template of how you can ask for referrals from Lottie Taylor from Amplemarket:

What Makes An Effective B2B Sales Process?

An effective sales process is one that is data-driven, incorporating measurable milestones for your sales team to track progress and optimize performance over time.

The goal of your B2B sales process is not just to create it and set it in stone for years to come, but to monitor its performance and iterate on it with small changes.

Here are the elements of an effective B2B sales process from our experience here at Arrows:

• Well-documented: The B2B sales process needs to be clearly defined and easy to follow by all salespeople in your organization.
• Data-driven: Your team needs to make changes to your sales process depending on the performance of each stage of the process.
• Repeatable and trainable: You want to create a replicable sales process that can be taught to junior and new SDRs.
• Buyer-centric: An effective sales process finds out about the pain points of customers, learns about their budget constraints and what they want to accomplish, and provides a tailored solution to buyers’ needs.
• Adaptable: Your B2B sales process needs to be tailored to clients from different verticals and industries.

Improve Your B2B Sales Process With Arrows Sales Rooms

Our digital sales rooms will help your sales teams improve your B2B sales process and close more deals by keeping prospective clients engaged with mutual action plans, resource sharing, and milestone tracking.

Arrows also offers purpose-built onboarding plans and client portals that help you manage the entire client lifecycle out of one platform, instead of jumping between tools.

If you’re a sales leader looking for a B2B sales solution that offers:

• Effective buyer engagement tracking to help you see which leads are viewing the sales rooms in real-time and insights into buyer intent.
• A best-in-class HubSpot integration, which is available for all pricing tiers and lets you sync 50+ real-time data points.
• Other presale features, such as real-time alerts, buyer engagement tracking, and next meeting sync.

Then you can start with Arrows sales rooms for free.

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