B2B sales: a complete guide to how business-to-business selling works

Business-to-business sales covers any sale where the buyer is an organisation: software to a logistics company, accounting services to a manufacturer, equipment to a hospital. The buyer is spending company money, has to justify the decision to colleagues and will live with the result for years. That changes how they buy and how you need to sell.

Our post on B2B vs B2C telemarketing covers how the difference plays out on the phone.

Most B2B sales follow the same stages, even if companies name them differently. Knowing the stages lets you see where deals stall and who owns each step.

1. Target. Write down the ideal customer profile: industry, size, location, the trigger events that create need and the roles involved. Our ICP framework shows how.
2. Prospect. Start conversations with the right people. For most Australian B2B teams the phone is the strongest channel: 77 cold calls per booked meeting in Nousu's data, against 1,100 cold emails. See the sales prospecting guide.
3. Qualify. Decide whether the opportunity is worth pursuing. Frameworks like BANT (from IBM), MEDDIC (developed at PTC in the 1990s) and SPIN (from Neil Rackham's research, published in 1988) give structure. Compare them in the qualification frameworks library.
4. Discover. Ask questions until you understand the problem better than the buyer's colleagues do. Our discovery call questions post has a full set.
5. Propose. Show how you solve the problem and what it is worth, in the buyer's terms.
6. Close. Agree the commercial terms and the next step. See sales closing techniques.
7. Expand. The first deal is often the smallest. See upselling and cross-selling in B2B.

Very few B2B purchases are made by one person. Even a small deal usually involves the person with the problem, the person with the budget and someone who checks the risk. Larger deals add procurement, IT, legal and finance. If you only talk to one of them, you are relying on that person to sell for you in rooms you are not in.

How you sell depends on deal size, complexity and how much help buyers need. Most companies use more than one model as they grow.

Within any model, you choose how buyers first find you. Inbound waits for buyers to come to you. Outbound goes to them. Most teams need both: see inbound vs outbound sales.

• SDRs and BDRs find and qualify new buyers and book first meetings. See what an SDR is.
• Account executives run discovery, proposals and negotiation, and close.
• Account managers renew and grow existing customers.
• Sales managers hire, coach and run the forecast. See the sales management guide.
• Sales enablement and operations give the team the content, training, data and systems to sell. See the sales enablement guide.

In a company of twenty people, the founder often does three of these jobs. The first sales hires usually split prospecting from closing, because prospecting is the job that slips when there is a deal to close.

B2B sales is a chain of conversion rates. Revenue is the result of how many conversations you start, how many become meetings, how many meetings become opportunities and how many opportunities you win. Improve any link and the whole chain moves.

Work backwards from a revenue target with the pipeline calculator, or forwards from dials with the meetings per dial calculator. For the maths, see how to calculate pipeline conversion rate.

• Time zones. Australia has three main time zones, and daylight saving applies in some states only. New Zealand is ahead of Sydney and Singapore behind. Call in the buyer's local time: see the best time to cold call.
• Buyer tone. Australian buyers tend to respond to plain, direct conversation and switch off at hype. Local callers have an edge: offshore teams reach a decision maker on 1.5% of dials against 6% onshore in Nousu's data.
• The financial year. Australia's financial year ends on 30 June, which shapes budget conversations in the months either side.
• Compliance. Australian telemarketing calls fall under the Do Not Call Register Act 2006 and the Telemarketing and Research Calls Industry Standard 2017, and email under the Spam Act 2003. New Zealand's Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act 2007 covers email and texts but not voice calls. In Singapore, the PDPA Do Not Call rules exclude genuine business-to-business calls, and the Spam Control Act covers bulk unsolicited messages. This is general information, not legal advice.

For more on what goes wrong on the phone, see cold calling mistakes that kill pipeline.

Your champion has to sell the deal internally when you are not there. The best thing you can give them is a one-page business case in their language, short enough to forward and specific enough to survive questions from finance. Write it after discovery, check the numbers with your champion, and let them edit it.

{{company}}: {{project_name}}

The problem
{{problem_in_their_words}}. Today this costs {{cost_in_time_or_money}} a {{period}}, measured as {{how_measured}}.

What happens if nothing changes
{{consequence_of_doing_nothing}}.

The proposed change
{{solution_in_one_or_two_sentences}}.

Expected result
{{result_metric}} moves from {{current_value}} to {{target_value}} within {{timeframe}}.

Investment and terms
{{price_and_terms}}.

Risks and how they are handled
{{risk_1_and_mitigation}}
{{risk_2_and_mitigation}}

Next steps and dates
{{step_1_owner_date}}
{{step_2_owner_date}}

If you cannot fill in the cost of the problem, the deal is not qualified yet. Go back to discovery before you write a proposal.

Keep the business case separate from the proposal. The proposal is your document: scope, price and terms. The business case is the buyer's document: why they should change, and why now. When the two are combined, the buyer's finance team reads a sales document and discounts it. When they are separate, your champion can present the business case as their own recommendation, which is exactly what you want them to do.

A B2B forecast is only as good as the pipeline under it. Most bad forecasts come from deals that sit in a stage they have not earned, with close dates that move every month and no next step.

Use stage-based conversion from your own history to weight the forecast, not gut feel. The pipeline calculator shows how much pipeline a target needs at your conversion rates.

Most B2B companies start with founder-led sales. The founder sells because nobody else understands the product or the buyer well enough. The first sales hires should take work off the founder in the order that frees the most time without losing deals.

1. Prove the message. The founder or an early seller runs enough conversations to know which problem, which buyer and which words book meetings.
2. Separate prospecting from closing. Add SDR capacity, in-house or outsourced, so pipeline creation does not depend on the founder's calendar.
3. Add an account executive. Someone who can run discovery and close without the founder in the room.
4. Add a manager when there are three or four reps. Coaching and forecasting become a job in themselves.
5. Add enablement and operations as the team grows. Content, training, data and systems.

Each step needs the one before it. Hiring an account executive before the message is proven usually means paying a closer to prospect. Our post on signs a B2B company needs an outsourced SDR team covers the second step.

Most deals are won or lost in discovery, long before the proposal. A buyer who has explained their problem, its cost and how they will decide has effectively written your proposal for you. A buyer who sat through a demo without saying much has not, and the deal will stall at the price.

This is the logic behind SPIN, from Neil Rackham's research published in 1988, and behind most consultative methods since: questions about situation and problems, then their implications, then the value of solving them. Our consultative selling guide goes further, and the qualification frameworks library has question sets you can use on calls.