How Do You Sell B2B Product/Service?

You can't sell B2B if you drive traffic, you need to drive sales! It's different

I'm the founder and I lead the marketing at Striking Digital

We drive sales by reaching out to potential customers by cold emailing, and yes it's our only channel. We provide value first before we even open about our services. Then, we explain our ethics as a company and how awesomely we can help their business.

If you plan to cold email you definitely have to talk about your business, otherwise, you'll be on their spam box. Just don't talk about your service in the first contact point.

• There are times where one-off emails with a free business audit links would perform well
• Not to mention, there are also times where an email campaign of 7 - 8 sequences will perform well
• Newsletter, cold call, cold email, or your favorite channel, all need A/B test and ideally, you should pick the best
• Nobody likes the sale-sy salesman, truly help their business and they'll pay.
• If they don't convert, it's okay. You can genuinely leave and reach out 2 -3 months after to see if they need help not many sale-sy guys do this because they just don't care
• We even go a step further. When we don't win a sale, we still try to help their business by providing free valuables (eBooks, loom insights, deep analysis) cooked by our team for their industry/niche. And Joe, you can do something like this too.

It has worked so well so far. That's it from my end. Joe, how do you drive sales? And guys from Indie Hackers what do your ways look like?

I don't really sell it. I just run google ads while I'm building my product. That's how I acquire my customers. I'm going for a self-service model.

Someone told me that there are two types of b2b products. One where you offer self-service (e.g. they sign up, pay and start using the product), and another one where you have a dedicated sales team that actively seeks new customers and try to close deals. You should figure out which type of product you want to be first (because you can't be both at the same time!) and then you can figure out how you want to drive people to your product (e.g. cold calling vs blogs, ads etc).

B2B sales become smooth if they come to you. That means helping people, simple free tools, SEO, helpful blogs. Plenty of it.

Hey Joe!

I've grown and sold a few B2B businesses, and now I run a course teaching early stage founders how to get "just good enough" at sales to find their first 100 customers.

If you're into podcasts, I think you'd get a lot out of mine. There are episodes with experts on things like how to start doing cold emails, closing deals etc. Plus, interviews with successful bootstrapped founders where we dig into real detail on how they acquired their first, 10th, and 100th customers using sales.

Check it out here: https://pod.salesforfounders.com/

Happy to answer any questions you have too!

Hi Joe,

I think methods that work probably vary somewhat by industry but I can tell you what's worked for us.

I'm a founder at encaptiv. We specialize in virtual events (B2B) and remote presentations (B2C).

• create relationships with the gatekeepers to your target industry. In our case we built relationships with companies that organize events. They are the one's being approached by companies large and small asking what type of software solution they should use for a virtual event.
• set up a sales team. A lot of B2B is about relationships so finding the right people to sell it who already have the contacts is key.
• customize your RFPs. We use a template but always add the customer colors and logo to show them what our software will look like for their event. Communication and the wow factor is everything.
• get a booth at the conference of your target industry. Before COVID hit we were setup to partner with TechDay NY after having booths the prior two years. Attending this and other conferences has proven very valuable. On-line conferences are not the same but getting better. (we are working on it!)

We are pretty new so I'm sure this list will grow as new insights are gained. Hope this was helpful!