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if you're looking to learn what b2b sales is how it works and whether or not it's something you should be interested in stick around because we're gonna get all your questions answered in this video [Music] what's going on everybody it's patrick here before we get started make sure to give this video a like subscribe and turn on notifications and with that said let's go ahead and dive in so the first question we gotta ask is what is b2b sales well the definition that we are going to use in this video is companies or sales people who sell directly to other companies and that's why it's called b2b sales business to business so it's essentially when there's any commerce or transactions that happen between businesses and to further clarify what that means let me go ahead and give you an example of how i started my b2b sales career working at oracle so back when i was working at oracle i was selling human capital management software meaning it's just hr human resources software for like recruiters and people like that so one of the main products i was selling is taleo and taleo is basically an enterprise software and i was selling into healthcare companies with you know thousands of employees and essentially what taleo is is a recruiting platform for large companies right so the landing page on oracle's website doesn't really tell you exactly what it is but let me go ahead and show you so you know for example there's a healthcare company called human good right and they are essentially you know a company that helps take care of the elderly people and they have a whole business built around that so for the careers because they have thousands of caretakers and people like that working through their different companies when you apply for a job right you press apply now you know you go to this button on their website you want to apply in california other western states search for jobs and so what happens is you know human good goes into you see this website over here it says abhoud.taleo.net meaning they are using taleo which was the software that i was selling at the time when i started my career at oracle to run their recruiting systems so let's say somebody wanted to you know apply for a job as a registered nurse so they would click on that and then the software basically on their website basically they're using oracle to manage this entire process and when you apply for jobs it goes into the software and it's very easy for recruiters to see who applied to what and information like that so as you can see when it comes to b2b selling right so i was working at oracle i was part of a business and i was a salesperson and i'm selling my software to another business right not the individual not an individual consumer person i'm selling a software for thousands of dollars a year and you know they're gonna pay for it because there's a lot of value to it right business to business so that's like in the enterprise world but let's say the startup world what does that look like so actually one of my friends alan he has a company called crewfire and essentially it's a software company that's built for small businesses to you know create referral programs for the customers meaning like let's say you know your instagram brand like a swimwear brand you have 100k followers on instagram and you're selling your product through instagram and you want to you know have a referral program or some kind of ambassador program to get your fans to promote your products and your brand and things like that well you would use this software to manage all the people that are helping promote your brand and you would you know exchange value in return maybe you would give them a commission maybe you would give them you know free clothes whatever the case is so this software manages that entire process so this is business business because alan you know if you kind of see like pricing to even buy crew fire right you can't even buy it um on the website you would have to you know get pricing whether it's starter growth or business let's say you go into business get pricing and then you know over here you would schedule a call so in this situation you know alan is selling a software that's not available to consumer regular people there it's only available for businesses and the only way to buy it is if you actually click on schedule a call and you book a call with allen himself to see you know whether or not you're fit to even buy the software right so he has to qualify you make sure you're a good fit before you move forward with the deal now so that's business business now you know the thing that i'm not talking about is b2c right so business to consumer so some b2c commerce might be let's say you are subscribed to netflix right you're not necessarily a business you're just a regular individual person and you go on netflix and you know you pay like 10 15 bucks a month to get access to netflix right so these price points are a lot smaller right because it's for regular people to buy or if you're let's say going into the nike store or adidas and you're buying some sneakers that's business to consumer because you're not necessarily buying like let's say you know a thousand secrets for your company you're just buying one sneaker for yourself business to consumer so now that we understand the difference between b2b sales and b2c the next part of this b2b process is to understand the different b2b sales roles that are available and to simplify things i'm going to show you the ones that are typically most common especially if you are starting out your sales career so you get a feeling of you know what these roles are all right so the b2b sales rose the first one that most people start off with is the lead generation side which is going to be a sales development rep right so the role is sales development rep and what you will be doing is generating leads some other names for you know sales development reps might be sdr um business development appointment setter lead generation sales associate so no matter what terminology companies use when they write you know their job descriptions and when they're trying to hire you basically they're all the same thing right whether it's business development reps sales development reps they all do the same thing and that is it's their job to generate leads right to generate appointments with their dream customers and then get a closer to get on the phone to try to close the deal so that's the first process generating leads whether it's cold email cold calling or linkedin to set up appointments now who exactly are these appointments for it's for account executives right so that's actually the next stage usually um you know after you become sdr you would become an account executive an account executive is somebody who actually is the one who gets on the phone with a potential customer and they are the one that closed the deal so some different levels of account executive right and this would also be like let's say an inbound closer might be an account executive a high ticket closer is also account executive anybody who closes is essentially an account executive but there are different levels of this right there's small medium business smb mid market enterprise right so different size companies usually the more senior you become the more higher level people you would actually do business with so for example if you're a senior you might be you know doing big deals with like a starbucks or mcdonald's right these are enterprise accounts where if you can sell into them you know it brings in a lot of money because these companies you know spend a lot on whatever it is whether it's software or infrastructure or you know raw materials you know enterprise is where you want to go if you want to do less deals but each deal is worth a lot more now the next step of the b2b sales process is being an account manager and these are people who basically have to renew the customer get them to keep buying more or sell more to the customer with upsell or cross-sell sell them different things right so once you have a customer the next step to monetize that customer even more is to sell them different things that will complement what you already sold to them so some other names might be customer success a growth account executive you know a renewals manager these are pretty much all the same thing and all that really means is monetizing your customer even further so even though this chart kind of goes from left to right where it's sale sdr account executive and account manager i'm not necessarily saying that account manager is the next level after account executive right because you know they're actually just different parts of the sales cycle so in terms of hierarchy account managers are not more senior than account executives right they're kind of in independent parallel branches there are different parts of the sale cycle so account executives they usually close new deals so these guys usually get paid the most because it's the most difficult to get new clients account managers a lot of times not even on a sales quota but maybe they're on you know a different kind of performance basis and it's their job just to make the customer happy so account managers actually there's less pressure because you are only working with customers who already bought and it's actually a lot easier but one thing is for sure is that you know sales development reps usually are you know in the bottom of the totem pole because you know they're generating leads although extremely important um this is where most people start and you know because it's the entry level job so if you are let's say starting a sales career and you don't have any experience maybe you have some random experience where you deal with people but you never had let's say tech sales experience or you know been in an organization where they divide up b2b sales like this like i said before usually you're going to start over here sales development rep and these are entry level jobs that you can learn on the job and you don't really have to have any prior skills to do it as long as you're good with people um you're willing to learn uh you can probably do well with this job from there you can either become an account executive or you can become an account manager depends which route you want to go yourself or you can even be the manager to other sales development reps right so you want to think of each of these different verticals as parallel verticals where each you know if you're a sales member rep you're going to have a sales development manager and that's going to be a different manager from let's say the uh account executive manager right so these are all parallel b2b sales roles and normally when you start off as a sales development rep you might be doing it for six months to two years depending on how good you are and how fast you learn and then from there you can make a decision on whether you want to advance into the account executive role and start closing deals or if you want to be an account manager and help renew customers and cross sale or if you want to be a manager in another capacity or you can even go completely left field and not do any of these roles and do something else within the sales organization right there's the sales operations customer service you know there's so many different roles in sales it actually becomes very complex especially at large companies at oracle but generally when you're starting out these are the main three that you kind of want to look at to see you know what the potential is and then from there when you start working at the company you'll see you know what works for you based on your personality right because not everybody wants to be an account executive right because a lot of pressure doing it some people want to be an account manager and that's totally okay right so it's really up to you in terms of you know what fits best for your personality and what you want to do on a day-to-day basis so that said that's going to be b2b sales in a nutshell if you enjoy this video make sure to give it a like subscribe and turn on notifications and let me know in the comments you know what's the number one thing that you learned in this video and if you know b2b sales is a career that you are interested in because if it is i'll go ahead and make more videos about it and kind of share how you can break into this industry so with that said my name is patrick hope you guys enjoyed this one and i am going to see you guys in the next one