Business To Business Sales

Discussion in 'General Advice' started by bgreenberg76, Apr 19, 2007.

  1. bgreenberg76

    bgreenberg76 New Member

    I had a few questions about business to business sales. I've recently heard of quite a few success stories, and it has motivated me to want to go out and do the same.

    For those of you who have been successful going the 'business to business' route, can you tell me what kinds of business's you've had the most success with. i.e. car dealerships, gyms, bars...? and also, can you tell me what sort of business sales they typically were. i.e. did most business's want to buy the packages to use for their employee's, or for customers. I'm looking to see what angle you used when approaching business's and what worked best for the most part. Did you have more success selling to business's using the employee incentives program, or increasing their own sales through providing incentives to their customers? Or if you used some other angle that I haven't thought of.

    Lastly, my question is how exactly you approached these business's, what did you say? Is there some script to follow?

    I appreciate your help. Thanks.
  2. getagrip

    getagrip Gold Member

    Most of the people here are involved in work at home jobs of some sort - or at least want to start working from home. It seems like you are referring to direct sales.

    You mention car dealerships, gyms, and bars - these are all very different businesses - you might have a product that is targeted to all three, but I think you need to figure out just who your target market is.

    Other than that, if you have a product that you would like to sell to these businesses, you should probably just go to the bookstore and buy a book about how to sell - might give you a few pointers on how to sell to various businesses.

    Or you can go cold turkey and just go for it! [​IMG]
  3. beckie1229

    beckie1229 New Member

    bg76, if you go into the Coastal Vacations folder and look around a little, our friend Roger sells Coastal Vacations almost exclusively b2b. And also in that thread a very successful Coastal director, Jeff Mills, offers a zip file of his b2b packet which is quite comprehensive but Coastal specific. Travel appeals to everyone, so it would be good for all of the businesses you mentioned.
  4. twnuck

    twnuck New Member

    I have been in business to business sales most of my adult life selling various products. The key to success in each of the three industries I worked in (all three are unrelated) is to differentiate your product from the competition.

    As long as your customer views you as equal to the others then it all comes down to price and price alone and you are playing a tough sales game. So, whatever your product is, what can YOU do (or offer) that your competition can't? When you can answer that question you should use your answer to lead off every sales call. Focus on differentiation and meet needs

    A good example of this is Starbucks. When they came along they chose NOT to go head to head with Maxwell House and be a commodity business. Instead, they set up little cafe's and only sold their coffee there. They created a different "box" in which to compete and heck, there's no more commodity product than coffee! Now that they have a brand recognitiion they often go head to head with Maxwell House's of the world but at first they did it differently by doing something that no one else had done well.

    So, do it different and do it first and you will win the business to business sales game every time.

    Todd

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