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

Most B2B business owners, especially those in the services field, know that building a sales team is really hard work. In fact, most B2B business owners usually do the majority of the sales themselves for a large part of the early life-cycle of their business (Usually at least until $250,000 or more revenue).

I had a friend who wondered out loud why B2C and retail businesses are able to have other people fronting the business so much of the time, but for a B2B business, it’s really bloody hard to get and scale up the sales team without personally doing sales?

There are several key reasons for this state, and it’s everything to do with the nature of B2B businesses and the way that they are structured.

B2B businesses share five common characteristics in their 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

These five factors together, make building B2B sales teams difficult, especially for small B2B service businesses whose main offering is under $20,000.

Let’s break down why this is the case, factor by factor.

High Sale Value

This is a great thing, right? Indeed, it’s one of the most attractive factors that brings some people (myself included) to the B2B space. It’s big money! In fact, much of the world value is moving around in B2B through the value chain, often several times over, before it becomes B2C sales and GDP.

If the world economy is mostly high-value B2B sales volume, then why would that make it an obstacle?

Because high-value equals high risk for B2B decision makers.

And high-value = high-risk = more time to decide = more payroll expenses for you.

So while you get more money at the end, you spend a portion of the amount of payroll over the extra months and meetings, affecting cashflow and output from your sales funnels.

Multiple People Involved In Decisions (Buying Centre)

Having more people involved in B2B sales decisions makes for an interesting situation, and not necessarily in a good way for B2B business owners.

Firstly, it means that, simply by having more people, there are more chances for your deal to fall through for any reason. They could dislike you, or your product, or may just feel that your type of offering is not for them.

Secondly, it means that your deal could fall through due to internal politics, with people jockeying for influence and blocking purchases just to spite the other party.

Thirdly, your deal could fall through due to politics if you make any move that damages your support with a particular influence bloc. And believe me, there will be many blocs to tread carefully around.

You can see how a buying centre does make life highly complicated for the B2B salesperson.

Management Layers

Management layers between the front end of a business and the decision maker you are seeking make B2B sales much harder to target, and importantly, introduce the obstacle (or some say opportunity) of gatekeepers.

Gatekeepers are people in positions of influence, who control access to key decision makers. These aren’t necessarily highly salaried or ranked personnel, but they are often people whom the decision makers rely upon for filtering their information, such as secretaries or researches or executive assistants of all stripes in their office. They are a fairly common occurrence in the B2B world, and have to be treated with the utmost respect.

Working with gatekeepers is a whole ballgame in and of itself, and requires much more discussion in the Working With Gatekeepers Series, but suffice to say that due to their strong influence over whether you get the sale (or even the appointment), they make your B2B sales life a lot more colourful.

Higher Complexity Of Offerings

The higher complexity that B2B offerings represent (eg. buying a new conveyor belt system vs. buying your daily coffee) present two sources of difficulty for the B2B business.

The first is the need for greater education and guidance of the customer, and the corresponding requirement for B2B salesperson knowledge and training.

The second is that the customer has to spend more time and care to understand and analyse the decision, reducing impulse purchases, requiring a much clearer ROI / business case, as well as lengthening your sales cycle.

Need For Trust And Long-Term Relationships

The reliance on trust and relationships as a proxy for quality in many initial B2B sales means that a much longer sales lead time has to be accounted for in order to build up enough credibility to overcome the higher decision thresholds that B2B buyers would have.

They would want you to ideally have done work for them before, and have had a previous good experience with you (which obviously, doesn’t exist if you are approaching them for the first time).

This is both a good and a bad thing, of course, as it tends to benefit incumbents at the expense of new entrants to the market.

These five common characteristics lead to several important and operational sales implications.

So these are five common characteristics of B2B businesses that make sales more complicated in the B2B space, and in Part II of Why Building A B2B Sales Team Is So Hard, I’ll cover how these five B2B business model characteristics translate into real operational sales difficulties for your B2B business. So follow The Real Cost Of Sales and stay tuned to catch the next segment! (It is much appreciated by yours truly.)

Why Building a B2B Sales Team Is So Hard
Part 2
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.