Marketing and sales challenges for B2B companies
During my career, I had the opportunity to experience B2B and B2C commercial processes and if there is one thing I can share about it would be: that each one of them has its challenges but B2B sales and marketing requires special attention, once the process can be more complex than it looks like. In this article, you will explore from different perspectives the challenges for marketing and sales in B2B companies, spoken by different people, from different countries and backgrounds.
Happy reading!
When someone asks about sales and marketing, it is easier to give them an example from a B2C perspective because this market is part of each person’s life. Every day you get exposed to an advertisement, stores, and emails… they are all targeting you as a customer. However, when you have to explain the B2B world the complexity can be hard to understand. Once I heard from a marketing colleague: “I don’t know how you handle B2B, I really don’t like it and would rather continue with my B2C company, it is way easier to sell and target the customer”. Well… I love a challenge so why not go to the hardest side?
I had the chance to discuss this matter to Luz Garcia, a Digital Marketing Consultant in the Miami-Fort Lauderdale area and she mentioned that:
"B2B marketing is just as important as B2C marketing. It’s essential for other businesses to become familiar with the value of your product or service and turn them into a customer. One great way to market your company to other businesses is to use social media networks like LinkedIn which is mostly a B2B platform. Through this strategy, you’ll be able to position your company as a leader in the industry while also reaching potential customers."
My first contact with B2B was still in my undergrad, in an exchange agency. I was told to perform the famous “cold calls” to companies in Brazil, offering the opportunity to have an international intern working for them. The first question I got in my mind while performing this task was “who would be interested in having an international intern?”.
This question illustrates a lot Ian’s opinion about a major challenge in B2B. Ian McLaren is the Marketing Content Specialist at Summa Linguae Technologies, a B2B Canadian company with operations worldwide. For him:
“One of the major challenges when it comes to B2B marketing is narrowing down the buyer persona. When offering a specific product to customers, you generally know who to target and how. But in a B2B scenario, you must research who’s responsible for decision-making in each company and be able to target them specifically. Those roles and titles can change from company to company as well, so creative solutions must be developed to pick them out in different areas.”
As marketers, we learn how to define our public target, and how to design our persona but the reason behind mapping out these topics is one: study! You only master your persona when you understand their profile, considering who they are, what they do, their thoughts, dreams, fears… There is a tool I recommend while studying deeper the persona which is the empathy map. It is a simple framework that supports narrowing down the persona. As important as understanding who you’re selling to, it is also crucial to understand the best approach and how it fits into the customer journey.
According to Nicolo Alaimo, the founding member of the Sales Enablement Society, a Professor, and Co-Director of the Sales Global Program at FIU – Florida International University:
"Selling to large enterprise accounts is very different from selling to the consumer. Business to Business sales requires a deep understanding of the customer’s business and challenges. In most cases, the decision is made by a buying committee. Therefore, it requires the Sales Executive to identify the many people involved with a specific project, the decision-maker, the influencers, the gatekeepers, and the users of a potential solution. In all cases, the sales executive must learn to navigate within the customer’s business, speak the customer’s language, and present a solution focused on solving a specific customer problem. To justify the solution’s value, the Sales Executive might have to present a return on investment to the customer."
Still, about the B2B persona I asked Iêza de Oliveira, who has more than 5 years in the B2B sales field, now she is the Sales Manager at Gupy, one of the most fast-growing HR Startups in Brazil “what is the biggest challenge for B2B sales in a startup?”, she said:
I am passionate about startups. The energy, the ambition, and room for growing are fascinating. I am the Head of Marketing of a Startup in Brazil and being part of this ecosystem, helped me to understand the different challenges of Startups, considering their stage. The startup I work for is in the seed stage and I feel comfortable saying that the biggest marketing challenge is to find a market fit and generate sales opportunities in high volume, focusing on the desired scalability.
Now, for Flavio Marques, the previous Chief of Innovation at AEVO, also a B2B HR Startups in the growth stage and current Director of Timenow, a B2B enterprise:
"In my perception, the biggest marketing challenge of a Startup in the Growth stage is the efficient allocation of acquisition capital, when we reach this stage the company has already found the product-market fit and the channel-market fit, you know for who sell and where to sell, and also knows how to scale these sales, but the efficiency of capital allocation is lost because most of the time the metrics are focused on revenue and growth, with that the CAC starts to rise a lot and you have to question yourself " How can I efficiently spend my money again?”
While discussing with Flavio the challenges for startups in different stages, it was interesting how all the challenges we were able to map had something in common: the need of investing money and or time in analytics. If the challenge is generating leads, identifying the market, studying the buyer persona, or allocating resources in an efficient way, the best way to face them is basing ourselves on data!
Luckily, we are living in a digital era that provides us with many resources to support more data-driven decisions making. And to talk more about data analysis, no one is better than Santiago Carvajal, the current Business Insights and Planner manager at Expedia. Santiago has more than 7 years of experience with marketing business analytics and while discussing the importance of data analytics to overcome marketing challenges, he shared:
It is clear that B2B and B2C sales have their challenges and in this article, we explored some of the B2B ones. Compiling all the opinions shared in this post, we conclude that some of the marketing and sales challenges for B2B companies are:
It does not matter the challenge you’re facing, marketing strategies and most importantly – data analytics, can support and generate insights that might change the reality of the company that is investing in those!
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