Boosting Profitability: B2B Sales Consulting Essentials

Sales consulting services for your B2B business are not an option anymore, but it has become a necessity! The new founders and existing business owners have found B2B sales consultancy as a vital service assistance to help scale the sales rate of their organizations.

To give you a general idea, the B2B eCommerce sales increased to generate a revenue of around $1.77 trillion as of 2022. This figure states a 12% hike from the recorded stats of 2021. Not only that, but with the increased count of B2B eCommerce businesses, it is expected that the industry will generate a market size of around $ 6 trillion by the end of 2024.

The intention to explain this to you is there are businesses taking leaps to increase their sales rates. Therefore, the new businesses and the ones that are operating with untrained sales teams need to buckle up!

Therefore, relying on the B2B sales consultant company will ensure your team gets the right memo on how to gain leads and convert them into paying customers. This article gives you clarity on how B2B sales consulting experts can help you enhance your business productivity!

What is B2B Sales Consulting?

B2B Sales growth consulting, being provided by dedicated service providers, intends to help businesses, including startups, for solving sales challenges. It covers several sales responsibility categories, which include sales strategy, hiring, coaching, training, advising, processes, and other such tasks.

The B2B consulting firms that have the utmost expertise in the field of sales can help businesses improve their performance by providing you with strategic advice and by implementing the right set of practices. Not only that, but the B2B sales consulting services will help train and coach your sales teams to help them derive high-end productivity.

It becomes a very crucial service for businesses where there are less or no internal personnel to solve the sales challenges. The startups often outsource this service requirement as they lack the budget to train in-house consultants optimally for the job. The job of sales consultants is to help your team pave the path correctly and take an optimal approach toward ensuring more conversions and bagging more sales.

Why Businesses Need B2B Sales Consulting?

Companies are required to hire a B2B sales & marketing consulting assistant when they are experiencing immense challenges in acquiring stable sales for their business. If there are certain sales hiccups that the company is struggling to overcome with the use of an in-house team and resources, then B2B sales transformation consulting is what comes to the rescue.

To help you better understand the scope of B2B sales consulting and why businesses need it, here are the few reasons listed below:

1. The Changing Landscape of B2B Sales

The landscape of B2B sales has immensely changed over time. The sales teams of today must have the ability to tap into new markets for testing the ideation against some specific benchmarks.

When coping with the changing landscape and identifying the new markets, the B2B sales consultants can also help you with insights into deploying the new products into the market.

A business sales consultant can help you gain an idea of what the rest of the market is planning or considering to scale with the changing B2B sales landscape. With this, you will eventually be able to pursue the right opportunity!

2. The Role of Digital Transformation

The digital transformation has now helped B2B buyers attain better control over their buying process. Your buyers now have the capability to conduct in-depth research all by themselves for seeking information on supplier websites, social media, industry forums, review platforms, and others.

This shift in the B2B sales domain due to digital transformation has given them the ability to gather insights about your service offerings. All of it is now possible for the buyers without the need to interact directly with any of your sales representatives.

Thus, this increases the need for you to improve your B2B sales strategies and cater to the buyer’s requirements in a more enticing manner. Therefore, the use of professional consultants for tailoring your business’s B2B sales approach is of utmost importance.

3. The Cost of a Poor Sales Strategy

A poor sales strategy for your B2B business will drop your customer acquisition rate, and your sales rate will drop drastically. Outdated attempts to cater to your buyers’ requests or expectations will eventually make you lose them to your competitors.

There will be a lack of effectiveness, which will indicate that you are utilizing time and money for no outcomes. Poor performance in terms of B2B sales indicates a loss of money, time, resources, and opportunities.

The worst part is you might be contributing towards the growth of your fellow competitors. Therefore, hiring B2B online sales consulting can help you detect the loopholes in your existing sales strategy and fix them in order to help you scale your customer base.

Areas in Which a B2B Sales Consultant Can Offer Expertise

B2B sales consulting has the ability to help you with ample responsibilities associated with your business sales. Here are some of the areas where a sales management consulting experts can offer you expertise:

1. For Startups

B2B sales consulting for startups is quite different from that of established businesses, as there are often a lot of challenges, mostly in the initial phase of running a business. For the pre-seed/seed stage businesses, the B2B consulting experts will be working very closely with the founder of the company.

Following that, once the startup reaches the Series B stage, the B2B consultant will then start to work with the sales leaders and not the founders. Depending on the different stages of a startup sales consulting, the B2B professionals can handle responsibilities for them, such as:

• Coaching the founder
• Coaching the sales team
• Creating playbooks for sales
• Building the outbound engines
• Assisting the inside sales
• Help with hiring sales team members
• Building a sales strategy
• Building a sales process
• Compensation consultation
• Advising on general sales
• Sales enablement
• Management of fractional sales

2. SaaS Companies

Some of the responsibilities that B2B sales consultant company experts take for established SaaS companies include:

• Coaching the sales teams
• Optimizing the sales processes
• Execute hiring assistance
• Build a sales strategy
• Improve the existing process
• Cutting down the operational costs
• Recommend the right sales tools
• Consultation for improving inside sales
• Advising for the Channel partnerships
• Fractional CRO
• Management of fractional sales

3. Manufacturing and Supply Chain

The responsibilities of a B2B sales consultant for the manufacturing or supply chain sector include:

• Generating leads
• Running market research
• Help with efficient CRM
• Optimize the sales process
• Help your team gain product knowledge
• Handle negotiations with potential clients
• Report the progress
• Meet the compliance and regulations

4. Healthcare and Pharmaceuticals

The B2B sales consultants play specific and crucial roles while handling the service offerings of the healthcare and pharmaceutical sector, which include:

• Cost reduction
• Time-saving
• Customer engagement
• Process organization
• Better utilization of time and team
• Enhanced stability
• No wasting time on unwanted strategies
• Greater understanding of customers’ pain points and their behavior

5. Telecom and IT Services

The responsibilities of B2B sales consultants associated with the telecom and IT service providers include:

• Help your in-house sales team with improved skills
• Increase engagement in interactions between the companies
• Build a market position for your company through developments and negotiations
• Help in closing the business relationships
• Keep you updated with the latest technology trends
• Managing the talents
• Keeping you updated with consistently changing consumer preferences
• Support consultative selling
• Insight selling

6. Financial Services

Financial services are experiencing massive digitalization in the modern age. This sector has experienced immense sales challenges than all of the others mentioned in the list. Therefore, B2B sales consultants had to approach with serious measures to help this industry crack their new code of winning over the successful sales rate. The responsibilities that the B2B sales consultants have to offer for financial services are:

• Understand the market and specific financial services niche
• Well-structured diagnostics
• Learn more about the customers and their problems
• Organize the sales processes
• Help you with outbound marketing
• Training for your team to handle cold calls
• Cost reduction
• Time-saving

7. International Sales

International sales require more effort and precision while executing a strategy. Hiring the B2B sales consultants for the job would help you avail flexibility in terms of conducting international sales. The responsibilities they take upon being hired include:

• Market research services
• Localization
• Increase the number of your customer
• Competitive analysis in the domain
• Look out for the country with the best prospects
• Support at all stages of entering a new market
• Analyze both market trends and consumer needs

8. Customer Retention

B2B sales consultants also help you with boosting the customer retention rate for your business. So, the responsibilities they take up to make it possible are:

• Launch right surveys
• Use personalization
• Solve the customers’ issues
• Train your team to cross-sell and upsell

B2B Sales Consulting Responsibilities

The major responsibility of the B2B sales consulting company is to solve your sales challenges. They should come in when you need them and specify what’s working within your sales strategy and what isn’t! You will also get an idea of what can be optimized and what cannot.

The first and most important thing that your B2B sales consultant would do is leave the areas untouched that are working absolutely fine. Your sales team might feel like forcing themselves into all tactics, strategies, or beliefs to bring in more conversions for you. But that doesn’t work at all times!

This might feel right for your sales team, but the end clients or customers would lose confidence in your brand. Thus, you will lose out on opportunities. Therefore, hiring B2B sales consultants is a smarter decision. Some of the common responsibilities that B2B sales consultants take up are:

• Updating the clients with the progress
• Measuring the growth
• Delivering on high sales, etc.

B2B Sales Consulting Process

The steps that are followed in pursuit of making your B2B sales consultation a success and helping your business end up with an impactful sales strategy are:

• Segment the targeted customers
• Prospect and pre-qualify the customers for better targeting.
• Engage the prospects and build a positive relationship with them.
• Understand the buyers and their expectations.
• Position your brand offerings as the valuable offering to address those pain points.
• Give in commitment to delivering quality outcomes.
• Help your team work on delivering those promises.
• Continue with building rapport and encouraging teamwork.

Top Benefits of a B2B Sales Consultant

Some of the benefits associated with hiring a B2B sales consultant are:

• They will help you see the significant areas of improvement that can scale your revenue. The revenue will be increased by increasing the lead volume or conversion rate.

• Provides sufficient help to improve sales for startups for setting up the foundation.

• They help you with improving the overall business processes and creating the overall structure.

• Helps your business scale in terms of profit margins and helps scale them on priority.

• The sales cycle can be shortened, and the business deals will be closed faster.

What To Look For When Hiring A B2B Sales Consultant?

Some of the things that you must look for while hiring a B2B sales consultant include:

Expertise and Experience

The B2B sales consultant agency and the experts within should be experienced enough to handle the complex B2B sales challenges over time. The professionals should have experience in handling B2B sales across various industries to ensure different strategies can be executed for diverse clients.

Case Studies and Client Testimonials

Have a look at the case studies of dedicated B2B sales consulting agencies to understand the prior work they have done for different clients from varying industries. Following that, you can also have a look at the client testimonials to see the responses of their past clients upon their service quality.

Customization vs. One-Size-Fits-All

Check if the professionals offer customization in terms of preparing a sales plan for you. If they are offering just a one-size-fits-all B2B sales consulting approach, then they might not be efficient enough to take care of your industry-wise challenges. So, do look out for the options!

Common Mistakes to Avoid in B2B Sales Consulting

Some of the common mistakes that you should avoid while hiring B2B sales consulting services are:

Ignoring the Sales Funnel

While navigating your business operations to acquire more sales, you cannot ignore the sales funnel. Similarly, when hiring a B2B sales consulting service, you should not ignore the sales funnel and the client touch points at all. You must seek help for improving sales across all stages, and not just the select ones within the funnel.

Underestimating the Importance of Relationship-Building

Relationship building is very crucial for B2B sales, and it is important for you to encourage it. The B2B sales consulting company should provide you with service benefits upon building a positive rapport with the clients.

Failing to Adapt and Evolve

The market for B2B sales with respect to different industries is scaling immensely. The concept of digitalization has set the B2B industry to constantly grow and make the sales process even more complex. Therefore, your company must adopt and evolve over time, and the B2B sales consulting business should help you with the same.

Why Startups, SMBs, and Other Companies Should Consider B2B Sales Consulting Help?

Startups or new businesses often lack the resources to set up an experienced sales team. Instead, they hire interns or fresher employees to be part of their sales team. The proficiency of sales operations isn’t as effective as they expect it to be at the initial stages, and that leads the business to lose out on opportunities.

Therefore, hiring B2B sales consultants would help train your rookie team and make them the best versions of themselves for helping your sales rate scale to the next level. You don’t have to spend much on hiring an experienced team. Instead, you can advance the skills of your current team.

What to Expect When Working with OnPoint Management Group?

The things that you can expect from OnPoint Management Group to help you with your B2B sales consultation are:

• Clear procedure or process for generating leads
• Defined career advancement paths and roles
• Mentorship and expertise of senior B2B sales expert
• Strategies to improve efficiency and productivity

The steps that we follow in pursuit of helping you thrive in terms of B2B sales are:

• We will first be taking a close look at the existing sales functions.
• We will then use the data to compare it with the competitors’ numbers.
• We will then be using the results as the initiation point for the tailored sales strategy and processes.

Conclusion

B2B sales consulting can impose a material impact on your overall business. As you know, revenue is the lifeline of a business, and keeping it growing will help take your business to the next level. Companies make the basic mistakes or lack the in-house expertise essential for solving sales challenges.

When you bring in a sales consultant for the job, you eventually boost the expertise of your sales team and direct them toward implementing the right strategies to acquire more customers and generate more revenue.