B2b Solution Sale

Introduction

1. Contextualization and Relevance of the problem

The scope of this project aims to study the critical factors that influence the sales process in the Business to Business sector. Since the development of technology generalized the access to information to more people, companies started to know more about their business environment and their needs, and started looking for a new approach from their suppliers.

This new way of making business demanded the suppliers and their Sales Reps to improve their relationship skills and also to be more close and attentive to their client’s needs and market opportunities. This issue is very present in the technology sector, big companies like IBM or salesforce understood that their clients are no longer only looking for solution based products, but instead they want differentiated solutions that can allow them sustainable competitive advantages.

If we perform a Five Forces analysis of the business service today we can understand that the bargaining Power of the buyers is growing and the threat of substitutes is also becoming bigger. With the crisis of 2008 turning attention of the companies for being more efficient, IT companies registered a decrease in their sales. So, some of them realized that to become a big player in the next year they would need to diversify more their offer. This means that besides the usual approach of responding to normal RFP, companies and their Sales Reps felt the need to be one step ahead of the buying decision, that’s why some of them started a more challenging approach. As it is explained by some researchers^[1], this new class of Sales Reps are accessible to meet when asked, are good influencing others, speak the truth, and delivers commitments. These characteristics make them challenge the customer view by giving insights of problems and the consequent solutions, which their business will experience in the near future.

According to Liam Alvey^[2], relationship marketing can be applied when there are competitive product alternatives for customers to choose from, and when there is an ongoing desire for the product or service. This subject is very much related with the capacity to engage with the customer and to create a competitive advantage based on the relationship between the Sales Rep and the client. However, there is one back side of this approach; by developing the relationship marketing with the clients a company is vulnerable because some of the engagement partners of the client might develop a relationship with the Sales Rep and not the company.

1. Justification of the Theme Selection

The aim of this project is connected with the fact of many business managers find it difficult to sell their products when there are changes in the context of the sales process. By looking to the program of the majority of the business degrees in Universities, it’s perceivable that there are few courses about sales management or dynamic business approaches.

The majority of the business managers that are today Sales Reps, entered the companies in a very early stage of their careers, and if some of them changed their workplace, they tended to remain in the same industry. This can be a big advantage, since they can understand better the market needs, but at the same time if these professionals don’t embrace change, they become too narrow in their approach. If we take the IT business as an example, some Sales Reps were used to sell the same products for twenty years, with the same approach that they had twenty years ago. However the client today has access to much more information and many other companies are appearing and they are not afraid to compete, so that creates a lot of difficulties to win the proposals.