How do you improve your b2b sales?

Most new ventures struggle with an absence of sales process

A friend of mine, a founder of an infographics startup, stopped by our office few days ago asking for advice. Her question was quite simple. “How do I improve my b2b sales?”

After acquiring the first twenty business clients, her sales went down and was stuck. She thought that her company’s network was not big enough to expand further. In reality, the problem was more critical than that.

For early stage startups, it is difficult to know where to start with sales. It is hard to effectively narrow down potential buyers and manage all pending and prolonged deals, up to closing it successfully. One thing I realized after talking to dozen startups in similar situations was that these startups suffered from not having basic sales processes.

Zolzaya, CEO of CallPro (@CallProMN), Mongolia’s fast growing unified communication frontier, explained that many b2b startups suffer from exhausting and complex sales cycle or having no automated sales team workflow. Understanding sales cycle and sales team functionality is fundamental to every successful startup.

Selling is a process and sales team should be a fully automated machine. It is important to have a basic sales process that is repeatable and scalable for small startups in a B2B environment.

Setting up the sales process

When you enter market with your innovative product, it never sells itself. You will need tactics and techniques.

What can you do to automate your sales process and schematically start acquiring customers with a starter team that is as small as five or even three?

Even for startups with limited sales skills and capacity, the following three elements need to be in place to launch a sales campaign:

1. Team
2. Work scheme
3. Targeted pool of customers

Your sales team responsibility model can be simple as this.

Pick one person as the cold caller who would orchestrate the entire sales team from the office. This person should call companies, do an intro over the phone and make appointments. Effective sales calls will elicit more information from your clients. With more focus and making repeated calls, this person will quickly be able to deal with difficult questions from customers and make engaging introduction.

The rest of the team should go out in pairs and make meetings at companies as much as possible without worrying about calls, intros, and other office duties. Normally two to three sales meetings per day is a good number. Create sales teams of two people. It is always better if a sales meeting has multiple attendees from your side.

Give potential clients access to valuable product information that’s focused on their business through your online presence. If they are ready to purchase your product, remove all barriers to do so by having all necessary documents for the next steps.