The concept of B2B sales

Business-to-business (B2B) is defined as the exchange of goods and services between businesses. In the B2B context, businesses cooperate in order to integrate business solutions and achieve the best possible business results.

B2B markets are totally differentiated than business-to-consumers (B2C) markets. B2B customers vary significantly in their consumption of products because they do not have the physical limitations that individual customers do. Besides, suppliers are organizations and not individual consumers and therefore, they are well aware of the products because they have performed a thorough market research and a price comparison before making their final buying decision.

To better illustrate how B2B functions, let’s assume that you own a publishing company with eight popular magazines titles. Your company had spent both time and money into creating distinct and appealing websites for each magazine, but did not use email to drive traffic to these websites. So, what you needed to do is to design a marketing campaign to inform consumers about your magazines websites.

Generally, to drive traffic to a website, you have to give consumers an incentive. In the plethora of websites and in the competitive marketplace of today, consumers do not have the time to surf around and look for the best website. They look for the website that offers them a little bit more than the others, usually a discount, a special offer or something similar. You have decided with your marketing team to offer consumers an exotic trip for two to a Hawaiian resort. So, you turned to the travel agency that you have been cooperating for the corporate travel of your firm and you arranged the details of the incentive trip to Hawaii. All consumers had to do was to visit the website, answer a couple of questions, give their contact details and press submit.

To design your marketing campaign and attract consumers you turned to an email and communications firm, specialized in using advanced technology to design graphically rich emails.

To reduce the percentage of undeliverable emails and make sure that your customers and a larger percentage of consumers will receive your offer, you cooperated with a local courier business in order to send out leaflets with your campaign.

The above example illustrates perfectly the philosophy of B2B. By closely monitoring marketing and sales procedures, firms realize increased productivity and savings, while they improve their business results. Besides, in the B2B context, businesses keep customer acquisition costs low and increase marketing and sales productivity by integrating sales and marketing to the creation of a single revenue pipeline.

The major driver of growth in the B2B context is technological revolution. Technological advancements happen at a swift pace and these changes speed up product and service developments. The Internet era in conjunction with sophisticated business strategies create the grounds for an integrated marketing strategy that incorporates both technology and organizational objectives. Besides, businesses adapt their marketing strategies to the competitive business environment of today and engage to innovation in order to discover new market segments and new customers for their products, while creating new sales and distribution procedures.