What is B2B (Business to Business) Sales and How is it Changing?

The definition of business-to-business (B2B) sales is a sales model that involves one business selling products or services to other businesses. This is opposed to B2C sales, or business-to-consumer sales where a business sells products or services to consumers. B2B sales are complex, large, and require multiple people who serve in different roles across a longer sales cycle. B2B sales often occur over a course of weeks through various discussions, rather than a singular transaction.

The Difference from B2C Sales

Besides the significant difference between the target buyers, B2B sales differ from B2C sales in a variety of ways. Firstly, B2B offerings usually have a higher price point, since their solutions are often larger and more complex. They also have a much longer sales cycle because of the large deals, complex solutions, and multiple stakeholders. Third, B2B sales require multiple touchpoints to close deals, meaning they are not typically done in a single transaction.

Due to the price points, B2B deals often require buy-in from multiple decision makers within an organization. As such, B2B sales processes tend to be more strategic than B2C sales. While B2C selling tactics tend to appeal to buyers’ emotions, B2B selling tactics often appeal to a buyer’s rationality. The B2B buyer’s journey tends to be far more complex than the typical B2C buyer’s journey.

Let’s look at a typical B2C buyer’s journey. Rachel needs a new toothbrush. She goes online and does a Google search for “best toothbrush.” She finds an article about a high-end electric toothbrush. And then, after reading some favorable reviews on Amazon, she buys the toothbrush. If only B2B sales were that simple. B2B deals are often high-risk and high reward. And as such, there are some key differences:

More Stakeholders

According to Gartner, the typical buying group for a complex B2B solution involves 6 to 10 decision makers. So why does B2B sales require so many key decision makers? As an example, imagine a new Chief Marketing Officer needs an expensive marketing automation system. She may consult key members of her team before finding an offering. And then, after deciding on a potential solution, she’ll need to get the budget approved by the CFO. A CIO or Chief Data Officer might also need to be consulted to ensure that it will work with the company’s existing technology stack. At small-to-medium sized companies, a CEO might even be involved in key purchasing decisions.

Longer Sales Cycles

Virtually every salesperson who has ever worked at a B2B company has felt frustrated at one point or another at the long sales cycles. So how long are B2B sales cycles? According to a report from CSO Insights, three-quarters (74.6%) of B2B sales take at least 4 months to close, while nearly half (46.4%) take 7 months or more to close.

Dependence on a Predictable Pipeline

So what do these long sales cycles mean for B2B salespeople? It means that they need to constantly have a pipeline of deals to be working. As such, B2B sales often requires intense collaboration. Though some B2B account executives (AEs) source their own deals, B2B AEs regularly depend on marketing teams and sales development reps (SDRs) to ensure that there is always a steady pipeline of new qualified leads to work.

What Is an Example of a B2B Sale?

Consider a software company that sells a revenue intelligence platform to enterprise sales organizations. The process begins when an SDR identifies a VP of Sales at a 200-person SaaS company as a strong fit for their ideal customer profile. The SDR reaches out over several touchpoints across two weeks, eventually securing a discovery call.

On the discovery call, the SDR qualifies the opportunity and confirms there is a real problem: the VP’s team is struggling with forecast accuracy and reps are spending too much time on manual CRM updates. The SDR hands the opportunity to an AE, who runs a demo tailored specifically to those pain points.

The demo goes well, but the VP needs to involve her CIO to assess the Salesforce integration, her CFO to approve the budget, and her Head of Sales Operations to evaluate the implementation timeline. Over the next six weeks, the AE runs separate conversations with each stakeholder, provides an ROI calculator, shares a case study from a comparable company, and responds to a formal security review from the IT team. Procurement then issues a contract, legal reviews the terms, and after a round of negotiation on pricing, the deal closes.

From first outreach to signed contract, the process took eleven weeks and involved seven people across the buying organization. That is a representative B2B sale: multi-stakeholder, multi-touch, and driven by business value rather than impulse.

How Difficult Is B2B Sales?

B2B sales is genuinely difficult, and the degree of difficulty has been increasing as buying processes grow more complex. Gartner research found that 77% of buyers describe their last B2B purchase as complex. That complexity creates real challenges for sellers at every stage of the process.

The fundamental difficulty in B2B sales is that you are rarely selling to one person. You are navigating a buying committee of 6 to 10 stakeholders, each with different priorities, different objections, and different levels of urgency. Getting one person excited about a solution does not mean the deal will close. The AE still needs to help that internal champion sell the decision to their colleagues, address concerns from procurement and legal, and maintain momentum across a process that can stretch for months.

Long sales cycles create their own pressure. Reps need to maintain engagement with multiple deals simultaneously, keep pipelines full through consistent prospecting, and stay patient enough to nurture relationships over months without losing focus. The emotional stamina required to do this consistently is one of the most underappreciated aspects of B2B selling.

B2B buyers also come into conversations better informed than ever before. They have often done significant research before engaging with a seller, which means reps can no longer rely on controlling the information flow. The value a rep must provide in every conversation is higher, and the tolerance for generic pitches or poor discovery is lower.

That said, B2B sales is also more achievable than it has ever been for reps who invest in the right skills and tools. Technology now exists to prioritize the right prospects, surface coaching in real time, and give managers visibility into exactly where deals are stalling. Reps who combine strong fundamentals with effective use of these tools consistently outperform those who rely on instinct alone.

Common B2B Sales Challenges

Even experienced B2B sellers and high-performing teams run into predictable obstacles. Understanding these challenges is the first step to addressing them systematically rather than treating each one as a unique crisis.

Reaching and Aligning Multiple Stakeholders

Getting access to the right people is hard enough. Keeping them aligned throughout a long buying process is harder. Different stakeholders evaluate a purchase through different lenses, and a deal that looks solid at the VP level can stall when it reaches finance or IT. Reps who do not actively map the buying committee and develop relationships across it are constantly surprised late in the cycle by objections they could have addressed weeks earlier.

Maintaining Pipeline Health

Because B2B sales cycles are long, the work required to keep a pipeline healthy is constant. A rep who stops prospecting during an intense closing push will find an empty pipeline waiting for them a quarter later. Balancing active deal work with ongoing prospecting and lead development is one of the most persistent challenges in B2B sales, particularly for AEs who are both hunting and closing.

Forecast Inaccuracy

B2B sales forecasting is notoriously unreliable when it depends on rep-entered CRM data and subjective deal assessments. Deals that look certain slip at the last stage. Deals that seemed risky close ahead of schedule. Without visibility into actual buyer engagement and deal momentum, managers are often making resource and planning decisions based on data that does not reflect reality.

Long Ramp Times for New Reps

Because B2B sales requires deep product knowledge, strong qualification skills, and the ability to navigate complex buying processes, new reps take time to become fully productive. Average ramp times in B2B sales can run anywhere from three to nine months depending on deal complexity. During that window, teams are carrying underperforming capacity while investing significant management time in onboarding and early coaching.

Keeping Up with a More Informed Buyer

Modern B2B buyers do extensive research before engaging with sellers and often arrive at conversations with strong opinions already formed. Reps who rely on information-delivery as their primary value add are increasingly easy for buyers to bypass. The reps who succeed are those who can add perspective, challenge assumptions, and guide buyers through complexity rather than simply presenting features and pricing.

A Typical Business-to-Business Selling Process

Inbound Lead Qualification

A typical inbound B2B sales process might start with Marketing generating a portion of leads via forms, trade shows, email marketing, advertising, and other channels. These inbound leads would then be qualified by an inbound-focused SDR. Often the lead will simply be disqualified based on a variety of factors. But when leads are qualified, the inbound-focused SDR would then turn the now sales-qualified lead over to the AE for a demo.

Outbound Prospecting

In many healthy B2B sales organizations there are also outbound-focused reps. Using tactics like cold calling, cold emails, social media connections, and more, these outbound SDRs find potential prospects that fit ideal customer buying profiles. They often reach out in a cadence that typically requires multiple touchpoints including calls, email, text, and social until they can initiate a conversation with a potential buyer. After qualifying this lead, the outbound SDR would then hand the buyer off to an AE for a demo.

The B2B Demo

During the B2B demo, the AE has to learn how to best help the prospective company. This involves asking questions, understanding prospect pain points, and working with them to discover an ideal solution to those pain points if one indeed exists. Great B2B AEs are masters at building rapport, overcoming objections, coming up with out-of-the-box solutions, and above all, they are great listeners. Giving a great demo is part art form and part science. Here at Revenue.io we offer AI-based tools that help sales coaches uncover best practices that drive powerful outcomes during demos, so coaches can discover which best practices can be scaled across the entire team.

From Demo to Deal

If a demo goes well, then an AE will have an internal champion inside the customer company. The AE’s job then is to empower that internal champion to do selling within the company to other key stakeholders. AEs will often collaborate with Marketing teams on decks, sales collateral, battlecards vs. key competitors during competitive deals, ROI calculators, and other collateral that helps move deals forward. One way to look at it is that buyers often have a series of buying jobs such as calculating ROI, and B2B sellers should be enabling those buyers with tools to get their jobs done. Late in the sales cycle, during the contract phase, B2B deals typically go through Procurement and Legal prior to gaining approval.

Customer Success

When contracts are signed, this is hardly the end of a B2B sales cycle. Customer success reps, a hybrid between sales and support reps, often work with customers to ensure that they are successful with the product. This is key, because in B2B sales, customer retention and expansion are vital. In fact, many companies employ a business model entitled “Land and Expand.” The goal here is to sign a smaller deal upfront, ensure that the customer is successful, and then grow the deal size steadily over time. Smart B2B companies realize that their most effective salespeople are often going to be their customers. A killer case study or testimonial can be absolute gold. After all, it’s one thing to hear how great a solution is from a sales rep. But watching a video of a high-level executive at a Fortune 500 company sing the praises of a solution is going to be so much more powerful.

How Is B2B Sales Changing?

A Redefined B2B Buyer’s Journey

According to research from Gartner, B2B sales is getting more and more complex. In fact, 77% of buyers described their last B2B purchase as complex. Gartner identified that the B2B buyer’s journey has changed in response to growing complexities. They now identify the buyer’s journey as consisting of six phases that customers must complete to their satisfaction in order to successfully finalize a purchase:

• Problem identification: “We need to do something.”
• Solution exploration: “What’s out there to solve our problem?”
• Requirements building: “What exactly do we need the purchase to do?”
• Supplier selection: “Does this do what we want it to do?”
• Validation: “We think we know the right answer, but we need to be sure.”
• Consensus creation: “We need to get everyone on board.”

Gartner has also identified that the B2B sales cycle has become less linear. As prospects are doing more of their own research, it is common for them to loop across the buyer’s journey, revisiting previous stages. As an example, at Revenue.io we offer a variety of sales enablement solutions for sales teams. It is very typical for our customers to start by exploring a solution to one perceived problem such as needing SDRs to dial more prospects every day. But through the buying journey, they often unearth information about problems that they didn’t even know they had, such as the need for a solution to surface which calls are most in need of coaching.

The Shift to Account-Based Sales

Another major change to B2B sales has been a newfound emphasis on account-based sales (ABS). ABS targets specific accounts in advance, using a variety of datapoints to determine which companies would be an ideal fit. After deciding which accounts to target, there is often a coordinated effort between sales and marketing to generate demand and set up meetings with a key buying circle at the target companies.

B2B Sales Enablement Tools

Even as B2B sales processes grow increasingly complex, success in B2B sales is often more attainable than ever before. Thanks to powerful innovations, B2B companies are regularly simplifying sales processes, ramping new reps faster, and coaching teams far more effectively. Here are some of the most powerful sales enablement tools available to sales teams.

Sales Dialers

A sales dialer is a solution that empowers reps to dial, connect with, and convert more customers. While B2C telemarketers often use autodialers, B2B sales teams tend to favor dialers that offer more rep-focused features including voicemail automation, local area code dialing, automatic data logging in CRM, contextual information from various sources, and calendar integration.

Guided Selling Solutions

Guided Selling solutions go a step beyond dialers by offering reps real-time visibility into which prospect or account to reach out to and how to reach out, whether by phone, email, text, or social media. The Revenue.io Guided Selling platform can even automatically prioritize leads in real time based on activities like email opens, form submissions, downloads, and more.

Conversation Intelligence

Conversation intelligence solutions use artificial intelligence to automatically discover calls based on key criteria. A conversation intelligence solution like ConversationAI can automatically find calls where reps talk over prospects too much, calls where key competitors are mentioned, and more. They can help coaches automatically discover opportunities to move the needle without having to manually sift through every call.

Account Engagement Platforms

Account-based engagement platforms like 6Sense and DemandBase can help sales and marketing teams work together to convert target accounts. These platforms offer a variety of tools that help companies identify target accounts, score customer intent, and more.

Real-Time Coaching

Real-time coaching is one of the latest technological innovations helping B2B sales teams convert more customers. Real-time solutions can help scale coaching by automatically recognizing key phrases during calls and dynamically providing reps with helpful advice and content that empowers them to be more successful.