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 B2B sales strategy, and what should it include?
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 do you build a B2B sales strategy?
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.
Start with the work, not the tools. Write down what your reps do on every deal between calls: the prep, the research, the recap, the follow-up email, and the CRM update. Then pick the fewest tools that cover that list.
Make your CRM the one place where every deal’s next step, owner, and date live. If a next step only exists in a rep’s inbox or notes, the deal stalls when that rep gets busy.
Before you add a tool, ask two questions. Does it work with the CRM and call notetaker you already use? And will your reps open it every day, or is it one more tab they forget?
Arrows (that’s us) does that between-call work on top of the stack you have. It reads each deal’s call transcripts, emails, CRM, and notes, and keeps a gameplan for every deal: a path to close, built from your team’s playbook and from what’s actually happening on that deal. It does the prep, the recap, the follow-up, and the CRM update, and your rep approves each one before it goes out. It works with HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Close, and Attio, and with notetakers like Gong, Fathom, and Granola.
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 one of the many B2B sales enablement tools, such as Bigtincan, to create personalized sales collateral at scale.
Bigtincan 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 hand new customers off to onboarding
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.
Most of that is decided at the handoff. Before the deal closes, write down what the buyer said success looks like, who owns it on their side, and every date they mentioned on calls. Give that to whoever runs onboarding, so the customer never has to explain their goals twice.
Introduce the onboarding lead on a call before the contract is signed, not after. Agree on the first milestone and a date for it.
Then put a check-in on the calendar for when the customer should be seeing results. That’s when your sales team comes back to ask for the referral.
What mistakes do teams 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.
#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.
How do you get every rep to follow your B2B sales strategy?
A strategy only works if every rep runs it on every deal. Your best rep does that on a handful of deals. The rest get improvised between calls.
Arrows is promptless AI for account executives. The playbook is written in plain English: how your team works its best deals. Every time something happens on a deal, like a call ending or a new person showing up on a thread, Arrows reads that playbook and decides the best next action for that deal.
If you’re a sales leader who wants:
- A gameplan for every deal, so your strategy shows up in the work and not just in a doc.
- Call prep, deep research, follow-up emails, and CRM updates done for your reps, with a rep approving each one before it sends.
- More stakeholders brought into each deal, every date from your calls tracked, and a nudge when a deal goes quiet.
- All of it working with the CRM and notetaker your team already uses.
One kickoff call, and the agents start on your open deals that same day. Book an agent kickoff to see how Arrows works.