Why Building Up A B2B Sales Team Is So Hard (Part 2)

In part one, we covered the five main differences of B2B sales systems and processes from B2C business, now, we’ll come to understand how these five factors contribute to the difficulty of building a sustainable B2B sales system and team.

Quick recap of the five common characteristics in B2B sales processes:

1. They mostly deal with sales of higher per-sale value (immediately or over time)
2. They deal with multiple people who work together to make the decision (also called the buying centre)
3. They have to work through a varying number of layers of management to get to the right decision makers
4. They tend to have more complex product and service offerings (than B2C)
5. They tend to be based on trust and longer-term relationships

So these present a series of issues which increase the complexity and difficulty of the sale process. Compared to B2C sales processes, the sales cycle lengths tend to be much longer, the product knowledge required much deeper, and the number of stakeholders involved, more.

These difficulties, longer sales cycles, and increased complexity, create several major operational sales issues on a company-wide level when building a B2B sales team:

1. Delayed ROI on new sales staff for up to 6–12 months
2. Higher quality / sophisticated sales manpower required for the sales team, presenting difficulties in recruitment
3. Very long onboarding periods for sales staff to pick up product knowledge as well as build up a consistent sales pipeline
4. For higher complexity projects, a multiple specialist team (technical pre-sales, account manager etc.) is needed
5. Training & motivation difficulties leading to high turnover
6. Difficulties in handling massive disruptions caused by turnover

Let’s break these down one by one.

Delayed ROI Of Sales Staff

Having delayed ROI from your sales staff, is due to a combination of the long lead times in three areas:
i. Sales recruitment (typically 3–6 months depending on budget)
ii. Sales training and pipeline-building once recruited (typically 6–9 months)
iii. B2B sales cycles (typically 3–9 months)

It is the single most frustrating thing that a B2B business owner faces, because it effectively makes adding new sales team members like capex (capital expenditure), you end up spending tons of payroll for 9–12 months with often weak results to show for it, and introduces severe lag times to your revenue growth of up to 12 months for some businesses.

This creates a Catch 22 for the business owner- especially if you are already suffering and you need new revenue to cover your expenses, you recruit salespeople, but in the meantime need to pay for 6–12 months of additional expenses to your normal burn rate to get that revenue flowing, and that’s only if you retain the manpower.

You need to have lots of money to properly onboard a new sales staff to get more money, and it will come in much later. As most small B2B businesses are cash-strapped to begin with, this is a killer problem.

To make the money, you need a lot of reserves to do proper sales recruitment, training, and guidance. Since many small B2B business owners don’t have this, they usually revert to a part-time/commission-only salesforce (which comes with its own set of nightmares entirely, read the article Part-Time Sales Hell), and do a lot of the sales themselves in a non-scalable fashion.

Recruitment Difficulties For Quality Sales Manpower

B2B sales are complex things, the average salesman-on-the-street can’t just waltz into your business and begin selling comfortably. Even strong salespeople from other B2B industries would need time to get up to speed, especially if the business models of the clients differ greatly from their previous experience.

This means that finding good salespeople is extremely difficult, in terms of time spent searching for someone with the right capabilities, self-drive, and in particular, competing with their opportunity costs of selling other big ticket finance or real estate items.

Most small business owners cannot hope to match the commission structures of real estate, fund-brokering or other big ticket sale items, and are thus forced to work with lower quality and cheaper sales talent.

Very Long Onboarding Times

Due to the high complexity of running a B2B deal (managing the different influencers in a buying centre, advanced product knowledge and consultation), training even a single B2B salesperson from prospecting all the way to closing a deal and after-sales service takes an eternity in business time.

The onboarding time from hiring to closing a consistent sales pipeline of deals can be as long as 9-12 months for some businesses. This means more money spent upfront than many businesses are comfortable with.

Multiple Specialists Needed In B2B Sales Team

In B2B sales, you often require an account manager as well as a technical pre-sales consultant to help the deal close, to allay customer fears about technical capability and service levels.

This may make sense, but on a strategic and payroll level, means extra coordination and man-hour load, and eventually, extra headcount just for technical pre-sales.

The more moving parts you have in your sales system, the higher the chances of system failure.

This limits scalability to the speed at which you can recruit and form, storm and norm these interdependent B2B sales teams (they need time to learn to work together effectively). Recruiting would have to form teams and ensure that they have good chemistry to collaborate together- meaning that your system would have a lot more moving parts to manage.

High Turnover: Training And Motivation Issues

B2B Sales teams are also infamous for high turnover, especially in the early stages of the business when basic salaries are low and/or if the system runs largely on a variable or commission-only payscale.

The part-timer curse stems from a common mistake of business owners- they attempt to save fixed costs by hiring part-time or commission-only salespeople, and end up draining all their management bandwidth handling and motivating them, with poor results.

B2B sales teams have high turnover because the opportunity cost for elite salespeople is very high, by working with property brokerages or financial institutions, many of these can easily close 5x the amount they earn working sales in a small service firm. If your deal size is anything below 50k, you are likely to fall into this category and be unable to pay them as well or better as the alternatives.

Due to those inherent limitations for smaller services firms, they often try to engage part-time sales staff or commission-only staff. This is one of the greatest errors that any business owner can make. Unless the commissions are very very high, sales staff usually need to be full time with your business to be worth the effort, as by nature sales staff need to build up a momentum and pipeline in order to justify the sales training and on-boarding effort.

Massive Disruptions Caused By Turnover

With B2B sales being so complex, having long sales cycles as well as large buying centres with many stakeholders, and B2B salespeople requiring large investments in time and money spent training and teaming them up, any turnover in the B2B sales teams sends shocks running through any small to medium sized B2B sales team.

Turnover of a good B2B salesperson damages your sales pipeline for up to 12–15 months in the worst cases, and the smaller the team, the more pronounced the effects.

The fact is small businesses can’t offer many of the benefits and compensations that large firms can, so business owners need to be doubly aware of how they hope to keep and retain their B2B sales manpower, or, deal with the issue in another way entirely, as we would cover in the next part of this series.

Find out more about how B2B companies can overcome these five major B2B sales hurdles in Part 3, coming soon! Follow The Real Cost Of Sales to keep in touch with the latest data-driven insights into B2B sales processes and systems.

Why Building a B2B Sales Team Is So Hard
Part 1
Part 3

Kevin Ng is Managing Director of Thunderquote.com , ASEAN’s one-stop e-sourcing & procurement marketplace for businesses, with automated buyer guidance for project scoping and market rate data. Thus, ThunderQuote generates genuine, high-intent and qualified leads for business owners and salespeople.