How to Create a Winning B2B Sales Strategy?

Without a pre-defined sales strategy, your brand will only be relying on clients magically appearing on your doorstep (e.g., referrals).

This guide will walk you through an 8-step process of how you can build out your B2B sales strategy.

We’ll also provide you with actionable tips and expert info on how you can approach each step.

What Is a Sales Strategy?

A sales strategy is a detailed plan that outlines how your B2B organization will sell your products and services.

This strategy takes into account the target customer, the competitive landscape, and the marketing conditions to make strategic decisions.

It serves as a roadmap for your sales team to help them focus on high-value activities for the organization so they can improve their close rate and drive more revenue.

The complete strategy includes:

• Information about your target audience, known as ideal customer persona (ICP).
• Developing a value proposition for your product or service.
• Performance metrics and KPIs.
• A sales process of new client acquisition, including relevant sales channels.

A well-defined sales strategy will allow your brand to attract and nurture potential customers and provide them with a tailored solution.

Why Is Your Sales Strategy Important?

The B2B sales strategy is important because it serves as a benchmark for new and existing sales reps and provides clear objectives for the team.

This allows each person in your team to understand their roles and goals that they need to achieve to drive more revenue.

➡️ As for the business side, a sales strategy is important in driving predictable growth and scalability by setting realistic sales goals and nurturing new and existing customers.

By having a solid B2B sales strategy, your organization will be able to understand your prospects, approach and nurture them, and offer them a solution to their problems. 

What Is The Difference Between B2B & B2C Sales Strategy

The main difference between the B2B and B2C sales strategy is in the sales cycle, which includes a longer decision-making process, multiple decision-makers, and a focus on building relationships.

The B2B sales funnel can take up to a few months, as it involves getting buy-in from different stakeholders and budget approval.

➡️ In B2C sales, brands focus on 1 consumer with persuasive messaging so they can convert them on the spot or in the next few days with re-targeting.

This is why the strategy of B2C brands is to focus on social media and advertising to capture the attention of a wider audience.

➡️ In B2B, the strategy is all about building relationships, finding problems, and providing tailored solutions for a budget that makes sense for the prospect.

B2C marketing also cares about building relationships with customers, but it’s to increase the customer lifetime value (CLV) and not to bring them to purchase.

How To Create a Winning B2B Sales Strategy: 8 Steps

You can create a sales strategy for your B2B organization by:

• Creating an ideal customer persona (ICP).
• Aligning your sales and marketing team to work together.
• Setting up your sales tech stack.
• Defining your sales process, customer acquisition channels, and lead qualification criteria.
• Equipping your sales team with sales collateral, such as case studies and pitch decks.
• Developing a value proposition for your offer.
• Preparing answers to common objections around pricing and your solution.
• Creating a post-sales plan to onboard new customers and bring them value so you can ask for referrals.

Let’s go over each one of these steps in more detail: 👇

#1: Create an Ideal Customer Persona (ICP)

The first step in building out your winning B2B sales strategy is to define your ideal customer persona (ICP).

Your goal is to understand as much as possible about your customers' pain points, wants, and desires so you can tailor your messaging to them.

Then, you want to document your findings and create a document that outlines your ideal customer persona.

Here’s a template from Pipedrive:

➡️ You can refine your ICP by conducting user interviews and running surveys of ideal prospects to get a better understanding of them.

#2: Align Your Sales & Marketing Team

The second step in your B2B sales strategy is to align your sales and marketing teams.

That means ensuring both your marketing and sales teams work towards the same goals and collaborate on strategies to engage and convert prospects.

The 2 teams should have shared goals and metrics of success to eliminate silos and improve collaboration and accountability.

How Can The Sales & Marketing Team Work Together?

💡 Here are a few actionable strategies of how marketing and sales teams can work together for B2B sales enablement:

• The marketing time can produce case studies, white papers, and pieces of content for the blog.
• The sales team can provide feedback loops and regular communication around lead quality and help the marketing team better prioritize marketing channels.
• The marketing experts can work on optimizing your website and product/service pages for SEO and conversions to get more leads to sign up for product demos.
• Both teams can collaborate on building out ideal customer persona documents and identifying customer pain points.

#3: Set Up Your Sales Tech Stack

Next up, your organization should set up the sales tech stack to enable your sales team to be more productive and better engage with prospects.

In our guide on how to build your sales tech stack, we covered the core functionality for improving your bottom line and efficiency.

Arrows (our tool) offers an all-in-one digital sales room software, new client onboarding and a client portal, making it ideal for sales reps who do not want to switch between multiple sales tools and sync their data.

Keeping your sales team and prospects on the same page during the sales process can be challenging.

Arrows lets you send tailored sales rooms and onboarding plans to your prospects to help you control the narrative, build momentum, and close more deals.

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

You can close deals faster and improve your sales team’s close rates with dynamic pages that keep prospects engaged, equip champions to sell internally and maintain deal momentum.

Digital sales rooms give your clients a single, organized space for every resource, update, and next step in their buying journey.

➡️ Arrows sales rooms let you connect to Deals in HubSpot.

You can equip your sales development representatives with everything they need to close your high-intent prospects, such as:

• Resource sharing: Unify all resources and data about each prospect or new customer. Keep leads engaged between calls without the need for excessive follow-up emails.

• Next meeting sync: A component that stays up-to-date based on your next scheduled meeting in the CRM. You will not have to rely on link-dumping.
• Milestone tracking: Set clear objectives and track progress to ensure deals stay on course and deadlines are met.

• Engagement activity sync back into your HubSpot account in real-time, including creating and associating new contacts discovered with the deal in HubSpot.
• Track buyer engagement: See which leads view the sales rooms in real-time.
• Real-time alerts of when tasks are completed or when your leads ask questions during onboarding or in the sales funnel.

💡 You can replicate your champions by using templates to enforce a winning process.

It is possible to simplify follow-ups by replacing the traditional email with tailored sales rooms without having to overwhelm prospects with links.

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How Do Arrows Sales Rooms Work?

Arrows sales rooms can be set up from any existing deal once activated in your HubSpot account.

You can then edit and publish the sales rooms directly through the Arrows app, personalizing each room to your prospects.

Your team will then receive updates on room engagement, including views and updates, via the deal’s activity feed.

💡 It is possible to link sales rooms in email snippets sent from your HubSpot account, keeping everything connected.

💡 Our users achieve a 44% higher win rate with our digital sales rooms compared to the average win rate for deals over the last 12 months.

Case Study: Roobrik Is Closing More Deals With Arrows Sales Rooms

Roobrik has revolutionized its post-demo process by switching its approach from a generic feature and resource ‘’dump’’ to a more collaborative workspace with Arrows sales rooms.

They can close more high-ticket deals by delivering a unified customer journey - from the first touch to ongoing customer success.

Learn more about how they did it with Arrows: 👇

Interested in trying Arrows out for free? You can connect with HubSpot right away and test out our tool at no cost.

Not ready to sign up, yet? Request a demo to receive a walkthrough of Arrows to see how it connects to your sales process inside HubSpot. 

Other tools that you can feature in your sales tool stack include:

• Sales proposal software: Include personalized pricing, quotes, and e-signatures in one place that you can send to your prospects.
• Customer relationship management (CRM) software like HubSpot and Salesforce to track and manage your deals.
• Automated booking of meetings so your team won’t have to spend too much time back and forth with emails to find a good time to meet.
• Information scraping to get contact information of qualified prospects from their websites or social profiles.
• AI-powered features, such as predictive models notify you which deals are at risk.
• Interactive product demos that interest your customers and let them get to their ‘’aha’’ moment faster before they jump on a call with your sales reps.

#4: Define Your Sales Process

The B2B sales process is the structured series of steps that your sales team can follow to generate leads, pitch them your solution, and convert them into paying customers.

Similar to your ICP document, the sales process is also a documented process that outlines your:

• Channels of growth, including inbound (SEO, social media, referrals) and outbound (social selling, cold email).
• Relationship-building procedures to build rapport, nurture leads, and identify all key decision-makers.
• Follow-up strategy to help your sales team have a structured approach to following up with your leads and not leaving revenue on the table.

The end goals of your B2B sales process are to find qualified prospects, pitch your solution, build relationships, and close the deal.

➡️ It should be adaptable so your sales team can handle clients from different industries, verticals, and with different demands.

When discussing the sales process in the B2B sales strategy, sales expert Sunaina Ukil explains that content strategies fail because they are:

• Lack of thought leadership to stand out.
• Ignore the buyer’s journey.
• Focus on short-term wins instead of long-term trust.

Sunaina then recommends building out a sales strategy that educates your buyers at every stage of the sales funnel and positioning yourself as a thought leader in the industry,

The content should then be used to educate prospects and not just sell to them.

#5: Equip Your Sales Reps With Best-In-Class Sales Collateral

After you have defined your sales process, the next step is to enable your sales team with sales collateral so they can be prepared for client communications.

Sales collateral can be any kind of document or media that helps during the sales process to move your leads through the sales funnel.

Examples of such sales materials include:

• Case studies: Equip your sales team with a variety of case studies of your product or service that are based on different product or service use cases and industries.
• Product videos and interactive product demos that demonstrate the value of your solution to your leads.
• E-books and white papers that dive into deeper detail on how your solution works and what benefits can your prospects expect.
• Research reports with industry-leading data to showcase your company’s experience and expertise in your industry.

💡 You can use a platform like Bigtincan to create personalized sales collateral at scale.

The platform will then help your sales team quickly find the sales material they need with their SearchAI functionality.

#6: Develop a Value Proposition

Now that you’re prepared with your sales collateral and sales management platforms, you want to develop your company’s value proposition.

That includes clearly outlining the specific value that your product or service provides for your customers to help them resolve their challenges.

Defining your value proposition includes:

• Featuring how your product or service can resolve your customers’ problems.
• Emphasizing how your offer can drive measurable results (and being able to prove it with ROI calculators), such as cost savings and revenue growth.
• The kind of offer or guarantee that you can provide that you will meet this criteria.

You then want to include this value proposition in your sales pitches and materials.

➡️ Your team should also be prepared to discuss how your solution and offer are different from your competitors.

Given that you operate in a competitive market, an important part of the sales strategy is to highlight what sets your brand apart from the rest.

#7: Prepare Answers To Objections

A step that many sales teams are missing when building out their B2B sales strategy is preparing answers to objections.

The most common objections are related to the price of the solution.

No matter how good your solution and offer are, your brand will still be met with complaints about your pricing structure.

Objections can also be in the form of:

• Competitors: If your prospects are evaluating multiple options, they will be asking your sales team questions related to how your solution is different from your competitors.
• Solution-related objections: Prospects might come up with stories of how they tried your solution in the past and it did not work.
• Having to discuss it with different stakeholders first: These objections are best dealt with before they arise, which is why it’s important to build relationships with all decision-makers.

In cases like this, it’s important to have pre-defined answers for dealing with common objections that are faced in your industry.

You can use internal data, testimonials from happy customers and case studies to make your point and highlight the value of your solution.

Alternatively, you can equip your sales team with an interactive ROI calculator that shows prospects what kind of results they can expect to deal with pricing objections.

Here’s an example from AirFleet:

#8: Create a Post-Sales Plan

After you’ve created the sales strategy for generating and nurturing leads to become paying customers, your sales team should also build a post-sales plan.

➡️ You want to not only win paying customers but also to retain them, which is why it’s important to think of how you can foster relationships and assist them along the way in achieving their desired goals.

This is when the customer success team comes into place but your sales team can come back to ask for a referral when your clients are seeing results.

How To Make Onboarding Seamless

We believe that how you onboard new B2B clients plays a major role in retaining them in the long run and then being able to ask them for referrals.

You can use new client onboarding platforms like Arrows to streamline your onboarding process in HubSpot to bring your customers to value quickly.

Arrows onboarding plans help you create client-facing onboarding plans that attach to your HubSpot deals, tickets, and custom objects.

Our post-sales tool gives your team shared visibility into the onboarding progress of all of your clients and an easy-to-follow path to success for your new customers.

Arrows’ best-in-class HubSpot integration makes it possible to keep all your onboarding out of the platform.

The platform is designed to let your customers access their onboarding plans and complete their assigned tasks.

💡 Arrows is rated the #1 App for Customer Success in the HubSpot Marketplace.

How Do Arrows Onboarding Plans Work?

Each plan has tasks that are grouped into phases. Our tool guides your new clients to the next task they need to complete.

You can take your clients to a focused view of each task, which has different task types (from inserting a Google Doc to scheduling a meeting).

Our tool then syncs 50+ data points with your HubSpot property, enabling your customer success team to run and keep track of your entire onboarding process inside HubSpot.

Each deal is connected to an Arrows plan powered by our data, which is synced in real-time to your HubSpot account.

There, you can trigger automation and get live reports.

What is different about Arrows? Our solution combines workflow automation with a simple UI embedded in HubSpot. 

Our tool aims to keep prospects engaged and focused on the deal.

By providing onboarding checklists for your new customers to complete, you can reduce the onboarding time and increase your team’s capacity.

Here’s why customer success teams choose Arrows onboarding plans:

• Onboard your new customers quickly: Keep your clients on task with clear, easy-to-follow plans tailored to them.
• Increase your team’s capacity: Enable your sales and customer success teams to work out of HubSpot instead of jumping between tools.
• Track progress: Monitor every step of your user’s onboarding journey, from adding their brand’s guidelines to scheduling the initial audit.
• Best-in-class HubSpot integration, which helps you keep your team working in HubSpot without creating new inboxes.

Our platform makes it easy for your customers to perform tasks such as uploading files and filling out form fields. The data then syncs back to HubSpot.

Your customer success team will also get access to Arrows onboarding insights, which will help your team uncover insights from your customer onboarding process.

With Arrows onboarding insights, your customer success team will be able to uncover:

• How are plans performing over time for your new clients?
• How long does it take to complete the first task?
• Which tasks are taking too long to complete?
• Where are your customers getting stuck the most?

Common Mistakes Sales Reps Make In Their B2B Sales Strategy

The most common mistakes in your B2B sales strategy that we’ve seen brands make are:

• Skipping customer research.
• Relying too heavily on one growth channel.
• Not tracking and optimizing for the secondary metrics of success.

We’ll go over each one of these and discuss what you can do instead: 👇

#1: Skipping Customer Discovery & Research

Even though your brand might have created an ideal customer persona with outlined pain points, that does not mean every client would have the same challenges.

➡️ Your sales team should not be entering every conversation with the assumption that this prospect has the same problem as the previous one.

This is why it’s important to research each customer individually, going over their challenges and pain points during the evaluation phase of the B2B sales funnel.

If it’s possible, your team can also go over your clients’ LinkedIn accounts and websites to learn more about them.

Otherwise, your team will just come off as underprepared and full of assumptions, undermining their credibility in the conversation.

#2: Lack of a Multi-Channel Approach

Just because one of your growth channels seems to be working in the short term does not mean that it will be generating leads forever.

In B2B, it’s important to diversify your new client acquisition channels so you do not become too dependent on one channel.

➡️ For example, some B2B brands rely so heavily on getting referrals from happy clients that they never manage to properly build a following on social media, a blog, or an outbound strategy.

Given that you have the time and resources, you can develop a mix of growth channels, such as cold email, SEO, LinkedIn, and even events to maximize exposure to potential clients.

For example, we at Arrows have been incorporating events as part of our multi-channel approach for getting exposure to leads who might need our sales rooms and onboarding plans.

#3: Not Tracking & Optimizing Secondary Metrics

Some sales teams are so focused on the core sales metrics and KPIs like deal close rates, revenue growth and average deal size that they forget about the secondary metrics.

These secondary growth metrics include:

• Sales cycle length: This is the average time it takes to close a deal. If it takes your sales team too long to close deals, it can be something to look into.
• Opportunity-to-win ratio: Especially useful for referrals, it is the percentage of opportunities converted into closed deals.
• Customer acquisition cost: How much it costs you to acquire a new customer, including sales and marketing-related expenses?
• Time spent selling: What is the percentage of time that your sales team is spending on direct selling activities versus other tasks?
• Pipeline velocity: How quickly are your deals moving through each stage of the B2B sales pipeline?

You can optimize these metrics by tracking them consistently with a CRM or another analytics platform so you can visualize them in real-time.

That will allow you to set benchmarks to serve as a baseline performance that your team should strive for.

➡️ You’ll able to identify bottlenecks in your sales process, such as losing too many opportunities from referrals or your deals getting stuck in a certain stage of the pipeline.

Incorporate Arrows Sales Rooms Into Your B2B Sales Strategy To Win More Customers & Retain Them

Our digital sales rooms help sales teams close more deals by keeping leads 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 platform 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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