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B2B Business Plan Template

Published Mar.22, 2014

Updated Apr.19, 2024

By: Shawn Jensen

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Carving Out Success with a B2B Business Plan

Table of Content

B2B Business plan for starting your own business

Dealing directly with customers is a hassle, right? Well, due to the integration of monetary chains and dependence of businesses on one another for manufacturing as well as services, the B2B businesses are getting high in demand.

If you also want to start a B2B business, you should do a little research, choose the areas in which you want to serve, make a business plan, and launch your startup. For you to understand how to make an accurate business plan, we are providing a B2B e-commerce business plan of a startup namely Networks.

While the business plan for investors developed for Networks can give you a detailed insight into B2B business, you should still consider hiring a professional for the purpose. It is because dealing with businesses involves complexities and strict adherence to principles with the agreements and contracts. A professional can take care of even the smallest details while making business plan B2B correctly.

Executive Summary

2.1 the business.

Networks will be owned by Max Clint. The business will be based in New York City which is considered the hub of businesses. The businesses will provide various services in the B2B niche including outsourcing, HR services, software services, and more. The business activities are expected to go beyond NYC because Clint aims at providing freelance services as well.

2.2 Management of B2B business

B2B business requires adherence to extremely strict standards and therefore, the management of B2B business can be a headache if you don’t follow a proper plan. Before entering the enterprise, you must make a proper B2B SaaS business plan that covers all the management aspects.

To help you, we will document the personnel plan and operational B2B business plan made for Networks. If you are getting a franchise you won’t be the all-in-all decision-making authority, and in that case, you will have to consult business plan for a franchise for an effective management plan.

2.3 Customers of B2B business

The customers as indicated in B2B e-commerce business plan of Networks are as follows:

  • Small Businesses
  • Established Enterprises
  • Business Franchises

2.4 Business Target

The business targets of the Networks are given as follows in this B2B business plan sample:

  • Increase the cost of our services by 3% after 3 years of the launch while retaining the customer base
  • Earning a profit margin of more than $50k per month by the end of the first 6 years

3 Years Profit Forecast - B2B Business Plan Template

Company Summary

3.1 company owner.

Max Clint, the owner of Networks, has worked as a business consultant for more than 5 years. He is known to be an expert in legal business matters and management.

3.2 Why the B2B business is being started

The B2B is started because of Clint’s experience and interest in the field. His qualification, co-curricular activities, and desire for excellence have driven him to start this business. 

3.3 How the B2B business will be started

Step1: Develop Business Plan for B2B sales

The first step to step into this business is to create a B2B business plan template. For that you should explore what is B2B startup and read some B2B business plan examples. In a B2B startup business plan you should include your strategic plan, financial plan, customer segments, and marketing analysis.

Step2: Create the Brand

Since many B2B businesses are already running in the United States. You have to come up with exclusive ideas and expertise to become renowned in the market. To create a brand image, you should have highly specialized employees and success stories.

Step3: Establish Web Presence

In the information age, services are searched for on the web rather than on paper. Therefore, you must ensure that your business comes in the top lists of searches. For that, you would need to hire SEO experts, a graphic designer, and a web developer.

Step4: Develop & Market

The last step is to establish your company’s physical presence and market your venture to reach a maximum number of customers.

Startup Cost - B2B Business Plan Template

Operational and Strategic Planning

Services of b2b business.

The service sector of B2B businesses is multi-faceted. Therefore, while developing your B2B SaaS business plan template you should specify which services you plan to provide. You can study many B2B business plan examples for the purpose and explore their B2B marketing strategies examples for each service they provide.

You can also see the services given in this B2B business plan sample. This B2B business plan was created for Networks by professional business plan writers after probing several B2B business plan templates.

  • Doing Outsourced Tasks

Our major service will be doing outsourced tasks such as hiring and training the workforce, maintaining the equipment, and completing some parts of a larger project.

  • Business Consultancy

We will provide legal advice and consultation to businesses that come to deal with other businesses. We will also help writing business plan documents and making due diligence template . Moreover, our consultation will also be educational as we plan to acquaint our partners with the latest trends such as type of due diligence in use.

  • Software Services

We will also provide software services but only in the domain in which multiple businesses are connected via shared database and management software.

  • Freelance Services

We will serve as the middle ground between clients and customers to provide B2B freelance services.

Marketing Analysis of B2B business

Excellent work.

excellent work, competent advice. Alex is very friendly, great communication. 100% I recommend CGS capital. Thank you so much for your hard work!

Your B2B business can end in loss if you fail to attract the community that was supposed to buy from you. To succeed in the purpose, you have to explore the market for which you are making B2B sales business plan. you have to see which services are in demand and how much competition exists for which service. All these details must be included in your marketing plan for B2B business. 

Today, carrying out a market analysis is easier due to the online presence of B2B businesses. You will have to maintain a web presence and thus your marketing plan for B2B business should be devised accordingly.

To gain an insight into marketing plan template B2B, you should visit B2B marketing portals. Some sites even offer free B2B website in usa. Moreover, you can also find free guidance on B2B marketing planning from blogs like this on marketing plan B2B example. 

5.1 Market Trends

The trends for B2B businesses are going great. It is reported that more than 50% of B2B buyers are millennials. The industry is currently estimated at 6.7 trillion dollars. Moreover, 35% of the already-established B2B businesses are expecting a significant rise in online sales in the next years.

The trends provided in this sample B2B marketing plan are general. And while developing your B2B marketing business plan you should study the trends specific to your area.

5.2 Marketing Segmentation

Identifying the groups of target customers help you determine a focused strategy in B2B marketing project to target them. For a B2B company, customers can belong to various niches therefore it will be good to also explore some more business plans such as mobile notary business plan pdf .

In this example B2B marketing plan, the customer segments identified by Networks are given as follows:

Marketing Segmentation - B2B Business Plan Template

5.2.1 Small Businesses & Startups

Our biggest customers will be the small businesses that are especially newly established. New startups find it difficult to undertake all the tasks and recruit a huge workforce. Therefore, they rely on other businesses. In addition, due to a lack of trust in financial stability, they find it difficult to enter into long-term contracts with large enterprises. With our B2B services, they will be able to develop their businesses.

5.2.2 Established Enterprises

The second biggest category of our target customers includes established enterprises. They would require our services to deal with their business partners. Moreover, they will also seek our services to maintain a skilled workforce at all times.

5.2.3 Business Franchises

Business franchises would also need our services to get business plans and to do successful contracts.

5.2.4 Industries

Industries whose inputs and outputs are procured and transferred to enterprises will also need our B2B services to conduct their business affairs.

5.3 Business Target

  • Increase our prices by 3% by the end of the first 6 years
  • Maintain a CSAT score of 95+ from the very first month of our launch
  • Maintain a Customer Retention Rate of more than 80% from the very first year of our launch

5.4 Product Pricing

The rates for our services are a little bit higher than our competitors. However, due to our competitive advantages, we still expect to get more customers than them.

Marketing Strategy of B2B business

While developing marketing strategy in B2B, you must keep in mind that this time you are not dealing with a man in the street, rather you will be dealing with experienced professionals. Therefore, your sales strategy and advertisement techniques should be devised accordingly. In this B2B marketing strategy example, we are providing the sales strategy of the Networks.

Clint spent a whole 3 months devising his strategy in his B2B marketing template. Some parts of his plan are mentioned here in this B2B marketing strategy template.

6.1 Competitive Analysis

  • We are using the latest tech for all our tasks. For instance, we present digital cards to our business partners to leave the impression that at Networks, we are acquainted with all the latest products and trends.
  • We have hired the most competent and talented business experts in the town.
  • We have pursued regular training programs to keep our employees up to date.

6.2 Sales Strategy

For advertisement, the Networks will do the following:

  • Advertising the business on social media and through newspapers and magazines
  • Arranging meetups among the business CEOs and our sales executives to let our competitive aspects known
  • Providing a 40% discount on all our services for the first month of the launch

For more ideas, you can see law firm business plan and judgement recovery business plan.

6.3 Sales Monthly

Sales Monthly - B2B Business Plan Template

6.4 Sales Yearly

Sales Yearly - B2B Business Plan Template

6.5 Sales Forecast

Unit Sales - B2B Business Plan Template

Personnel plan of B2B business

The success of a B2B business depends on the ability of its employees to conduct affairs. To ensure you hire the right people, you should devise a measurable criterion in your business plan for B2B. In your business plan B2B you can assign measurable values to experience, interpersonal skills, and qualifications to make sure the recruitment remains impartial 

In this B2B business plan template the list of staff of Networks along with their salaries is listed below: 

7.1 Company Staff

  • 1 Co-Manager
  • 1 Web Manager
  • 1 Sales Executive
  • 1 Software Manager
  • 3 Business Consultants
  • 1 Legal Advisor
  • 2 Project Managers

7.2 Average Salary of Employees

Financial plan of b2b business.

The B2B business has great prospects in the earning domain. The business pays a lot due to immense opportunities arising out of increased dependency on other businesses for completing a task. The modern world works on the principles of efficiency and for greater efficiency outsourcing a part of one’s business is becoming a must.

Therefore, the business is sustainable as far as finances are concerned. However, to ensure long-term smooth monetary flows, you need a business plan for B2B sales. Since you will be spending a hefty amount on salaries and maintaining a skilled workforce at all times, you need to be careful about the b to b sales strategies. 

In this B2B sales plan template, we are providing the financial plan of Networks. In addition to the profit profile, if you also want to know what is B2B marketing and sales, you can refer to the sections written above.

8.1 Important Assumptions

8.2 break-even analysis.

Break-even Analysis - B2B Business Plan Template

8.3 Projected Profit and Loss

8.3.1 profit monthly.

Profit Monthly - B2B Business Plan Template

8.3.2 Profit Yearly

Profit Yearly - B2B Business Plan Template

8.3.3 Gross Margin Monthly

Gross Margin Monthly - B2B Business Plan Template

8.3.4 Gross Margin Yearly

Gross Margin Yearly - B2B Business Plan Template

8.4 Projected Cash Flow

Projected Cash Flow - B2B Business Plan Template

8.5 Projected Balance Sheet

8.6 business ratios.

  • What is the B2B business plan?

A B2B business plan is a detailed document that explains the major aspects of your business, how you plan to start and run it, and where and how much you intend to spend to ensure long-term sustainability.

To get a better idea of what a B2B business plan template is, you should study some B2B business plan examples. For a generic idea, this B2B business plan sample is also good to go.

  • What are the 4 types of B2B?

The 4 types of B2B markets are: 

  • Institutions 

Download B2B Business Plan Template From Here

OGSCapital’s team has assisted thousands of entrepreneurs with top-rate business plan development, consultancy and analysis. They’ve helped thousands of SME owners secure more than $1.5 billion in funding, and they can do the same for you.

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ASP B2B Technology Business Plan

Start your own asp b2b technology business plan

Discover Productions

Executive summary executive summary is a brief introduction to your business plan. it describes your business, the problem that it solves, your target market, and financial highlights.">.

Discover Productions, Inc. (Discover Productions) is a Business-to-Business (B2B) technology consulting company supplying turn-key computing solutions based upon the latest technology and utilizing Web-based applications. Utilizing state-of-the-art software and hardware in their 24×7 computing facility, Discover Productions also offers e-commerce solutions, Web hosting, Web development, remote help desk support, customer training, and systems support. Looking further into the future, the company plans to develop their own B2B Web-based applications. The company’s first product is expected to be released in June 2000.

Discover Productions is a Cleveland, Ohio based company, whose mission is to provide businesses with the technology they need to compete in a Web-based world. By utilizing state-of-the-art equipment and providing the necessary technical expertise, Discover Productions brings to the market a fresh perspective on B2B Technology Consulting.

Services Plan

  • Turn-key B2B Computing Solutions. The company is currently providing small to mid-sized businesses with Web-based computing solutions utilizing state-of-the-art technology.
  • Hosting Services. The company is developing hosting services to ASP companies and generate $200,000 plus in revenue.
  • Internet Sales.  We currently generate more than $300,000 in Internet sales from hosting, e-commerce, and Web development for small to mid-sized businesses.
  • Computing Solutions. We will increase our computing sales revenue from computer sales, service, and support to more than $450,000.
  • Web-based Applications . Develop, market, and sell our own Web-based B2B applications.

Marketing The company’s marketing strategy rests on the belief that its products and services represent a value-added approach to interpreting, qualifying, and understanding the complexities of the computer industry and technology markets. To implement this strategy, the company intends to place paid advertising banners on strategic websites in the computer fields and to utilize search engine portal and general media advertising.

Management Discover Productions has a world-class management team with direct knowledge of the industry, extensive research experience, and a unique perspective that B2B technology needs. Its team includes Mr. Edward Jones, CEO, and Mr. Jacob Manuel, CIO.

Financials The company is seeking first round funding in the amount of $914,900 for staffing purposes, purchasing software and hardware computing equipment, office costs, and other Internet related costs. The company is also seeking second round funding in the amount of $3 million for developing B2B Web-based applications, and their Educational Application Software. Projected revenues for 2000 to 2002 are $1 million, $16 million, and $45 million, respectively.

1.1 Mission

The mission of Discover Productions is to provide businesses with turn-key computing solutions based upon the latest technology utilizing Web-based applications and providing superior customer support and training to take a company’s infrastructure into the future and beyond.

1.2 Keys to Success

  • Strong technical experience
  • Effective management leadership
  • High quality service and support

Asp b2b technology business plan, executive summary chart image

Company Summary company overview ) is an overview of the most important points about your company—your history, management team, location, mission statement and legal structure.">

Founded in 1979, Discover Productions began in November 1992 to provide a new innovative role in the ASP technology market. The company began marketing turn-key Web-based Internet computing solutions to businesses entering the fast paced ever-changing World Wide Web.

Discover Productions is a privately held Ohio C-Corporation, with principal offices located in Cleveland, Ohio. This facility of 10,000 square feet serves as an administration and development facility. It includes two development offices, a conference room, a computer center, and a reception area. This new facility was opened in November 1999 and helps to provide customers with state-of-the-art networks and backup facilities. With the additional funding, the company plans to open a marketing and sales office in Cleveland, Ohio, and begin developing new Web-based applications.

2.1 Company History

Discover Productions provides its customers with the necessary tools to maximize their company efficiency and increase their profitability.  These include Web-based technologies such as e-commerce, Web development, a co-location computing facility, software integration, disaster recovery, and other Web applications that are critical to a customer’s business. Discover Productions also provides remote support in maintaining networks and software for customers as needed.

In today’s growing business, companies need computer and Internet service to increase growth, Discover Productions works with companies providing turn-key computing solutions for their office environment and Internet access. Management of Web services and a customer’s office computing environment can be done remotely from the Discover Productions head office allowing a cost effective solution for small to mid-size companies who need computing management.

Asp b2b technology business plan, company summary chart image

Products and Services

Discover Productions is developing its own B2B Web-based applications with their first product expected to be release in June 2000 and additional products to follow every six to eight months.

3.1 Product and Service Description

The following is a list of products and services offered by Discover Productions.

  • Web applications.  Discover Productions provides Web applications development for both internal and external customer websites that need dynamic site and business process flow automation.
  • E-commerce solutions . Utilizing a combination of Discover Productions’ Web design services and Goldwin’s e-commerce software the company is able to provide quality e-commerce solutions. Discover Productions offers a selection of products that allow customers to build an online store or add catalogs and shopping cart functions to a pre-existing site.
  • Web hosting solutions. Discover Productions provides Web hosting solutions for customers needing high availability servers. Discover Productions offers cost effective solutions and competitive pricing to grow a customer’s presence on the Web. From its Basic Hosting Plan to its Gold Star Plan, Discover Productions offers reliable technology and customer support utilizing high speed networks and 24×7 servers.
  • Co-location. Discover Productions provides co-location of Internet servers for customers needing high speed Internet access but wanting to manage their own equipment.
  • Web design services. Discover Productions provides Web design services for customers seeking to establish a Web presence. Discover Productions can design and develop a company’s Web presence in order for them to be competitive in today’s industry, as well as helping them to automate their business process flow. Discover Productions offers cost effective solutions and competitive pricing by offering Web development packages from a basic site plan to a full company site. Discover Productions can provide a quote based upon development of internal or external Web applications.
  • Disaster recovery solutions. Utilizing its in-house backup methodology, Discover Productions provides disaster recovery solutions.
  • Network design solutions. Discover Productions uses its in-house expertise to provide network design solutions.
  • Computing design solutions (Unix and NT).   Discover Productions uses its in-house expertise to provide computing design solutions for NT, Windows 2000 and Unix.
  • Equipment service. Discover Productions provides equipment service by reselling a 24×7 strategic alliance partner’s services.
  • Software and hardware. Discover Productions sells computer software and hardware using public and private e-commerce solutions.

3.2 Future Products and Services

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Key components of Discover Productions’s initial product development strategy can be summarized as follows.

  • Employee/Employer Web E-portal. This Web-based application will target strategic industries to bring employees and employers together. Current sites target only the technology market whereas Discover Productions will market to blue-collar industries. The release date for their first site is June 1, 2000, and will target the Waste Industry with the Oil Industry to follow next. Additional market targets will be released every six months.
  • CPA/Business E-portal. Although several accounting packages exist today both Web and computer based, no application is currently bringing together the accountant and small to mid-sized business. Discover Productions plans on bringing to market a Web-based accounting application that will simultaneously bring together both the customer and their accountant/CPA with all the information being available to both parties through the secure Discover Productions computing facility. Discover Productions will target strategic alliances with companies such as Intuit, PeachTree, and Solomon, makers of current accounting packages.
  • Educational E-portal. Today’s educational programs, although full of rich multi-media and loads of information, still teach to students in the same manner that has been utilized for years. The biggest failing of education programs today is that they teach the same information the exact same way to every student. Discover Productions realizes that every student is different, and their new suite of educational applications will be designed utilizing state-of-the-art artificial intelligence driven neural network programming. This will allow the Educational Program to modify itself to teach to each student based upon each student’s comprehension and ability. The software will be marketed with Educational Modules that can be downloaded or accessed via the Internet directly from the Discover Productions hosting facility. Companies can also design their own Educational Modules and have their own corporate e-portal by purchasing the core AI program and development kit. This revolutionary new concept in education can be marketed to all industries, companies, schools, and institutes. Discover Productions plans on marketing this product to company training programs initially, and then marketing to schools and institutes.
  • R&D, Think Tank. Discover Productions utilizes a think tank model in their approach to developing products. Utilizing the latest in state-of-the-art technology, development groups are organized to discuss and develop new products. Staff are encouraged and rewarded for bringing to the table new and innovative product ideas. Revenue is generated from these new ideas as well as companies contracting services for the use of the Discover Productions think tank.

Market Analysis Summary how to do a market analysis for your business plan.">

Business-to-Consumer e-commerce Estimates for the amount of online spending by consumers in 1998 range from $7 billion to $13 billion, with at least 25% occurring during the Christmas shopping season. Forrester Research, an information technology research firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts, believes that online spending will hit $108 billion in 2003.

B2B e-commerce Although there are very few pure B2B e-commerce firms, this segment dwarfs the business to consumer sector.  Forrester believes that this market, which totaled $43 billion in 1998, should rise to $1.3 trillion by 2003.

The Internet As of year-end 1998, almost 160 million users accessed the Internet regularly, up from approximately 101 million at the end of 1997, according to IDC. Clearly, the Internet is in an exceptional growth phase. This growth has pushed the capacity of existing networking infrastructure to its limits, resulting in frustration by Internet users.

Still, consumers have found the Internet to be a useful tool in the research and purchase of goods and services. Corporations have found that while the Internet is challenging traditional business models, it also offers significant advantages to companies that fully embrace the medium.

Exceptional growth By any measure, the Internet is one of the fastest-growing commercial phenomena ever witnessed by society. Host computers, or servers, have exploded from 3.2 million in 1994 to roughly 56.2 million as of July, 1999. During the same time period, the number of websites roared to more than 5 million from only approximately 3,000.

A key factor in the recent growth of the Internet is the popularity of the sub-$1,000 PC. Rapidly falling component prices have allowed PC manufacturers to pass cost savings on to their customers, resulting in a more attractively priced product. Computers sold at or below the $1,000 level have appealed to first-time PC users and lower income families. Because of the more affordable prices, PC penetration in the United States is now approximately 50%, according to Dataquest, a market research firm based in San Jose, California.

As a result of the Internet’s historical roots in the U.S. Department of Defense, as well as the rising penetration of PCs, the United States accounts for more than half of the world’s total Internet users. The European market, by contrast, has been held back by the high cost of Internet access. Consumers are typically billed twice in these markets, once by the ISP and once by the phone company. However, the forces of telecommunications deregulation in Europe finally appear to be having an effect, as several phone companies have recently eliminated access fees and now bill only on a per-minute basis. Such moves should eventually increase the penetration of the Internet in Europe.

In the United States, less than one-third of the population is connected, leaving plenty of room for growth. In 1996, people asked colleagues and friends if they had an electronic mail address. In 1997, people were asked what their electronic mail address was. When consumers today are asked why they purchased a personal computer, the most common answer is to connect to the Internet to get their email.

The explosive growth of the Internet, as a tool for global communications, has enabled millions of people to interact electronically. International Data Corporation, or IDC, estimates that there were 142 million Web users worldwide at the end of 1998, and expect this number will grow to approximately 502 million by the end of the year 2003. Rapid acceptance of the Internet as a communications platform by both businesses and consumers has created the foundation for significant growth in B2B and business-to-consumer e-commerce. IDC estimates that worldwide commerce over the Internet will increase from approximately $50 billion in 1998 to $1.3 trillion in the year 2003.

The Small Business Administration estimates that more than 98% of all businesses in the United States have fewer than 100 employees. These businesses often lack the size and financial resources to create economies of scale. In particular, these organizations typically do not maintain dedicated procurement departments and often do not achieve significant purchasing leverage. The Internet can provide small businesses and consumers with a number of advantages when making purchases, including:

  • Convenience
  • Wider selection of products and services
  • Competitive pricing

Small businesses are taking advantage of the opportunities the Internet affords. IDC estimates that the number of small businesses engaged in e-commerce will increase 47.1% annually, from 400,000 at the end of 1998 to almost 2.8 million at the end of the year 2003, signaling the broad adoption of the Internet by these small enterprises.

The widespread adoption of the Internet as a purchasing vehicle has created a wealth of opportunities for businesses that offer products and services to small businesses and consumers. Simultaneously, it has given both small businesses and consumers a wider variety of products from which to choose at competitive prices.

4.1 Market Segmentation

The company’s target customers are as follows:

  • Small to Mid-size Businesses (50-500 employees)
  • Businesses that are consolidating operations or merging
  • Military and government agencies
  • Others (accounting, medical, insurance, waste industry, associations, real estate, and new crafts market)

Asp b2b technology business plan, market analysis summary chart image

4.2 Target Market Segment Strategy

  • Small to Mid-size Businesses. All business of 50 to 500 employees are ideal regardless of industry. They purchase website, E-commerce, data networks, computers, and Web services such as Discover Productions provides. New feeder business within the semi-conductor, insurance, accounting, medical, and manufacturing industries are prime targets. 
  • Consolidations and Mergers. They look for outsourcing and new ways for implementing Web-based applications, intranet hosting and development, e-portals, e-markets and support to grow their business while cutting cost. Golf Smith, Nevada Bob, and Dyer Electronics purchases products/services such as Discover Productions provides.
  • Military and government agencies.  The company sells to government contractors, and government agencies such as the Advanced Research Program Agency (ARPA), Airforce, Navy, Army and other such agencies.
  • Others. The company also sells to accounting, medical, insurance, waste industry, associations, real estate, and new crafts market.

4.3 Market Trends

Identifiable market sectors. Forrester Research estimates that there are approximately 70 identifiable vertical market sectors (i.e., manufacturing, banking, insurance, stock-brokerage, pharmaceutical, engineering, etc.) in the commercial business world today.

High growth in e-commerce. Forrester also reports that B2B e-commerce will be a $1.3 trillion market by the year 2003 (Red Herring, December 1999). This will surpass the business-to-consumer market by five to seven times.

E-commerce market value. IDC, another market intelligence firm, predicts the market to be $633 billion by the year 2001. IDC also believes that the largest portion of business’s new technology investments will be devoted to studies and implementations of e-commerce B2B initiatives. Compounded growth between the years 2001 and 2003 is expected to be 35%. IDC claims that those entrepreneurs that set their banner in to e-commerce sectors will be the ones that reap the greatest profits and growth from the year 2001 and beyond.

Internet services market. Gartner calls B2B e-commerce, “the new millennium’s killer application.” The Internet services market will grow at a cumulative annual growth rate of 60% through the year 2003. IDC also claims that revenue in the worldwide Internet services market grew 71% in 1998 and is expected to grow at a cumulative annual growth rate of 60% through the year 2003 with revenues for Internet services approaching $80 billion.

IDC predicts that of the estimated 7.1 million small businesses in the United States, the percentage connected to the Internet will grow from about 40% in 1996 to about 70% in the year 2000. IDC estimates the number of users in the U.S. accessing the World Wide Web will increase from approximately 63 million at the end of 1998 to 177 million by the end of the year 2003.

Cahners indicates that “At least 50% of networking hardware revenue in the first half of 1999 came from small to mid-size companies.”

4.3.1 Forrester Research

Recent research conducted by Forrester research has shown that B2B will be $2.7 trillion by the year 2004. 

The research shows that e-marketplaces will be responsible for 53% of all online business trade. Research also shows that more companies are moving to make purchases and sales on the Internet and are looking to build deeper relationships with business partners. This research has also shown:

The B2B arena is reshaping e-marketplaces. The initial wave of B2B e-commerce has been dominated by extranets that automate off-line processes between partners. However, the Internet is now moving to a new business venue, e-marketplaces, where the dynamic many-to-many interactions will supplant stagnant one-to-one relationships. These new trading arenas will flourish because:

  • Industry inefficiencies run rampant. In today’s business environment, comparing offerings across suppliers requires multiple phone calls to various suppliers or enlisting the costly support of a broker. Time-consuming practices like these are easy targets for the Internet–where purchasing agents can gain instant access to comparisons of many different products.
  • E-marketplace vendors will lower technology barriers. Someone had to build the first e-marketplace, but now the technology landscape is maturing. Today, B2B entrepreneurs can acquire sophisticated marketplace software from firms like Tradex, Ariba, and Commerce One or entirely offload the building of their websites to a lengthening list of experienced e-commerce integrators like Vision Systems or Software Solutions Pakistan.
  • Venture funding is shifting to business trade. High-profile B2B players like VerticalNet–whose market cap currently exceeds $4 billion–have caught the investor community’s attention. The result? Many venture capitalists are placing bigger bets on their business trade portfolio. CMGI, for instance, just announced its plans to raise $1 billion to invest in B2B firms.

E-marketplaces will face a changing business environment. As more and more companies compete in the B2B market, there are going to be companies that will either have to sell or simply go out of business due to:

  • Virgin markets disappearing. While most existing e-marketplaces are launched in a world devoid of serious competition, such as the printing business, these uncharted opportunities will quickly fade away. And even though there are a lot of untapped new markets, they will not be for long and soon everyone will want a piece of the pie.
  • Feature-function races escalate. Functionality is not a big issue currently. Many websites simply put together a transaction processing engine and issue a few press releases and declare they have a B2B website. But as these websites face stiff competition, basic service offerings won’t be good enough. Firms will need to pump big bucks into expanding their online and offline capabilities just to satisfy the requirements of increasingly demanding participants.

Source: Forrester Research, Inc.’s e-marketplace report

4.4 Service Business Analysis

Discover Productions is part of the Web hosting industry.

4.4.1 Main Competitors

Specifically, competitors include Onramp, Saper Media Group, and Labnet which are detailed as follows:

  • Onramp, Cleveland, Ohio.  Onramp is a publicly traded company that was founded in 1994. It is considered an industry leader in the field of Web page design. Onramp is a provider of products/services that help businesses with their websites and hosting.
  • Saper Media Group, Cleveland, Ohio.  Saper Media Group is a publicly traded company that was founded in 1995. It is considered an industry leader in the field of websites. SMG is a provider of products/services that put businesses on the Web. The company’s products/services include website design and maintenance, graphic design, and application programming.
  • Labnet, Cleveland, Ohio.  Labnet is a publicly traded company that was founded in 1995. It is considered an industry leader in the field of Web page design. Labnet is a provider of products/services that creates websites and hosting. The company’s products/services include Web page design, website hosting, database services, and CGI programming.

4.4.2 Positioning Statement

Discover Productions believes that to stay ahead of its competitors it has to define its vision; to be a B2B Web-based turn-key solutions provider, developing new and innovative Web-based applications and become an ally to its clients in this diverse field. The company offers various benefits including:

  • Lead with the best products and services in the industry.

Discover Productions keeps a close watch on the technological advances that take place in the industry so that it can effectively implement its solutions. The company sends representatives to regional and national seminars and offers training programs for its staff. All this is done to ensure Discover Productions becomes the leading provider of industry solutions. Discover Productions believes in passing cost savings on to its customers. As such, the company purchases from Tech-Data which offers 30-day net terms and overnight shipping.

Strategy and Implementation Summary

Strategic Alliances The company plans to rapidly develop marketing alliances with industry leaders and pursue new sales of turnkey computing solutions, systems support, Web hosting, e-commerce, Web development, and Web-based applications. The market strategy is to capitalize on Discover Productions’s innovative, information technology applications by expanding into new market areas.

Marketing The company will run advertising banners on various websites that are visited by its target markets. The company anticipates that it will use several different forms of promotion to attract clients to its services. These promotions will include discounted packaged deals that are all inclusive. Customers will purchase the company’s education materials, license the company’s software, and join the chat room for “one low introductory price.”

Sales The sales process involves several steps which include relationship building, customer requirements/needs, product presentation, demo, closure and implementation. This approach is used because with our technical products and services it is more effective than competitors’ single product approach.

5.1 Competitive Edge

  • One-stop shopping for companies needing complete “from the ground up” Web-based applications and business solutions. Discover Productions delivers the most comprehensive, cost-effective information available.
  • Provide comprehensive, cost-effective Web development, hosting, e-commerce and Internet computing solutions that deliver results.
  • New innovative B2B Web-based applications that target and capture untapped industries bringing businesses together over the Internet, and expanding the learning potential of everyone with their own line of educational products.

5.2 Marketing Strategy

The company’s marketing strategy rests on the belief that its products and services represent a value-added approach to interpreting, qualifying, and understanding the complexities of the computer industry and technology markets. To implement this strategy, the company intends to place paid advertising banners on strategic websites in the computer fields and to utilize search engine portal and general media advertising. Through these approaches, customers of the company will attain access to the company through its websites, where they will in turn access the company’s advertiser driver browser, which the company expects will expose the customer the company’s proprietary products and services, as well as to links with other online firms with which the company has strategic alliances and advertising relationships. 

Discover Productions’ marketing plan is developed in order to support the company’s corporate goals and strategies. It is developed from knowledge gained from industry analysis, competitive intelligence, and what is known about customers and clients. It should be noted that every reasonable effort has been taken to develop the marketing plan from data and analysis. It is possible that some of the data could be interpreted in different ways, which could invariably lead others to arrive at different conclusions about how to approach the marketplace and promote the business.

The specific marketing goals for the company are:

  • Increase Discover Productions brand awareness.
  • Develop new clients and markets.
  • Develop strategic alliances (via marketing).
  • Build Discover Productions co-brands and partners.
  • Increase advertising revenues.
  • Increase traffic to Discover Productions.
  • Expand existing clients and markets.
  • Develop marketing presentation materials.
  • Identify opportunities for new products and services.
  • Enhance Discover Productions offerings.
  • Enhance public relations efforts.

5.2.1 Marketing Programs

The delivery channel for Discover Productions’s marketing strategy is based on an integrated marketing model which utilizes a mix of communications media. The marketing programs are designed to increase brand recognition and attract new customers. They are diverse and include a range of marketing communications.

The Internet.  The Internet will be the primary marketing tool. Site development will include: 

  • Use of state-of-the-art graphics.
  • Easy access to pages within the site.
  • A menu that includes easy enrollment for membership or product purchases.
  • Use of state-of-the-art execution platform for trading.
  • Easy payment methods and secure online transaction processor. 

The company will also advertise on various strategic sites on the Internet including:

  • Submitting URL for each page of the site to search engines.
  • Banner ads on select search portals.

The website.   Discover Productions currently has two websites and has received several inquiries from them. An additional site will be added to provide an online catalog and quote system. Plans are underway to upgrade the website with additional marketing material, as this is expected to be one of the company’s primary marketing channels.

Print media.  Inserts and/or ads in weekly and daily newspapers will be considered as the budget allows.

Broadcast media.  Radio, television, and cable advertising will be considered as the budget allows.

Email.  The company will use demographic profiles to send messages to potential members and to:

  • Provide a newsletter to all active accounts.
  • Provide thank you notifications to all visitors, along with advantages that go with being a member.

Promotions. The company will use various promotion channels to reach its target markets.

  • Secure space at online trading expos.
  • Secure space at business expos in West Palm Beach and Boca Raton.
  • Presentations at various Chambers of Commerce gatherings. 
  • Newsletters.
  • Special membership promotions.
  • Browsing site for free.

5.3 Sales Strategy

Discover Productions uses a direct sales force, relationship selling, subcontractors, direct marketing, and Internet marketing to reach its markets.  These channels are most appropriate because they utilize the quickest path and time to the market place, reduced capital requirements, fast access to established distribution channels, and best of processes for relationship building. Sales and distribution are made by/through strategic alliances and partners with Fortune 500 companies.

5.3.1 Sales Forecast

Positioning and company image. The idea is to communicate to the investor community, the company’s unique combination of capabilities, products, competencies, and investor relations programs. Management believes that its corporate image is distinguished from other ASP firms. Discover Productions’s business model is designed to utilize its cumulative management experience in computer solutions, Web hosting, Internet sales, e-commerce solutions, new Web-based products, and technical & marketing experience to create an unbeatable marketing and sales strategy, consisting of these components: 

  • Corporate image (and image enhancement).
  • Marketing propositions.
  • Solid advertising programs.

Asp b2b technology business plan, strategy and implementation summary chart image

Management Summary management summary will include information about who's on your team and why they're the right people for the job, as well as your future hiring plans.">

The following topics discuss the management organization within Discover Productions.

6.1 Organizational Structure

Discover Productions’s organizational structure is illustrated below.

President/CEO, Edward Jones

Vice-President/CIO, Jacob Manuel

  • Technical Support Manager (To Be Determined)
  • Research/Product Manager (To Be Determined)
  • Web Application Manager (To Be Determined)

Vice-President/Marketing (To Be Determined)

  • Sales Manager (To Be Determined)
  • Strategic Alliance Manager (To Be Determined)
  • Business Development Manager, Jennifer L.Jones
  • Advertising Manager (To Be Determined)

CFO, (To Be Determined)

  • Accounts Manager (To Be Determined)
  • Human Resources Manager (To Be Determined)

6.2 Quality Assurance Program

Quality excellence is the foundation for the management of our business and the keystone of the company’s goal for customer satisfaction.  It is, therefore, company policy to:

  • Consistently provide services that meet the quality expectations of our customers.
  • Actively pursue improving quality through programs that enable each employee to do his or her job right the first time.

The Discover Productions Quality Assurance Program consists of new employee orientation on the Quality Assurance Plan, in-house training programs for all employees, and a formal certification training program.  Quality Assurance checks are done on an ongoing basis, and on completed jobs to ensure quality workmanship to the company’s customers.

At Discover Productions, the customer comes first. Putting the customer first involves learning about the customer’s ever-changing needs and meeting their expectations for lasting quality.

The company strives to prevent problems by anticipating them. Prevention can be achieved through planning and can avoid the time and costs associated with rework.

Quality happens through people and it is the people that make the Discover Productions business successful. Within an environment that stimulates self-motivation and creativity, employees can take ownership of the processes that make our business, and therefore our clients’ businesses, succeed.

6.3 Personnel Plan

Senior Management Team

Discover Productions’ management is highly experienced and qualified.  It’s key management team includes: Mr. Edward Jones as President/CEO and Mr. Jacob Manuel, CIO.

Other key personnel at Discover Productions include:

  • Ms. Michelle Jackson, who is in charge of new business development.
  • Mrs. Dana Beck, who has specialization in Web database programming. 
  • Mr. Michael Taylor, who is a database programmer. 
  • Ms. Mary Joseph, who is in charge of Web page design.

Financial Plan investor-ready personnel plan .">

The company is seeking first round funding in the amount of $914,900 for staffing purposes, purchasing software and hardware computing equipment, office costs, and other Internet related costs. The company is also seeking second round funding in the amount of $3 million for developing B2B Web-based applications, and their educational application software.

The following sections outline the financial plan for Discover Productions.

7.1 Projected Profit and Loss

Discover Productions’ estimated income statements for FY2000-2002 are outlined below.

Asp b2b technology business plan, financial plan chart image

7.2 Projected Cash Flow

The table below provides the company’s projected cash flow for FY2000-2002.

Asp b2b technology business plan, financial plan chart image

7.3 Balance Sheet

The projected Balance Sheet is shown below.

7.4 Business Ratios

The following table contains important business ratios for the consulting industry, as determined by the Standard Industry Classification (SIC) Index code 8748.

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10 B2B Marketing Plan Examples To Help You Stay Organized

Jesse Seilhan

Jesse Seilhan

10 B2B Marketing Plan Examples To Help You Stay Organized

As complicated as B2B marketing can be—it’s easy to get caught up in different B2B marketing strategies, channels, campaigns, and tactics. Having a plan is the best way to keep things secure and structured.

Whether your plan is meticulous, loose, or a combination of both, having that plan will keep you focused. Depending upon what market you are targeting, you will need a different mix of strategies and channels addressed in your marketing plan.

b2b marketing plans example

For B2B marketers, creating marketing plans is part of your job description. Your marketing plan dictates how your business runs as it helps develop content, timelines, etc. Developing content requires an understanding of your market’s demand.

Market demand informs what content customers want to read—and this is informed by what questions (or keywords) they are typing into the search engines.

When you provide the content your customers are looking for, your business is more likely to grow.

directive newsletter cta

10 B2B Marketing Plan Examples to Inspire You

Of course, knowing where to start with your marketing plan can be a challenge. To help you find direction, we’ve rounded up ten marketing plan examples to help you stay organized.

#1: Brilliant B2B Digital Marketing E-book by Smart Insights

Image of strong B2B digital marketing e-book.

When looking for B2B marketing plans, a great place to start is with actually building the outline of the plan before deciding what tactics, strategies, and KPIs to fill it with.

Enter Rene Power and his Brilliant B2B digital marketing e-book . You’ll find the critical questions you need to ask yourself and your company to understand your current position in the field.

Are you targeting the right keywords? Is your website built for the future?

Sometimes you need to start there before you can employ that killer email marketing strategy or clever viral campaign.

#2: Building an Email Marketing Strategy by Bronto

Developed by e-mail marketing consultant, Tamara Gielen , this plan is all about using email for marketing advantages. It focuses on creating a comprehensive plan that uses emails as primary market outreach .

image2 2

Email marketing utilizes customer outreach as a way to create focused content as well as grow your customer base. Perfect for marketers and market executives, this plan is strategic yet straightforward.

It’s important to remember that different types of outreach follow different best practices. For instance, you wouldn’t send the same copy in an email as you would a LinkedIn message. For email outreach, however, we’ve done an extensive amount of testing on how to increase response rates and closed/won opportunities.

For actionable tips on how to increase your response rate in your email outreach, you can read this post we wrote on how we improved our email response rates in our link building outreach campaigns.

Screenshot of article that helps enhance B2B marketing strategies.

#3: The Four Step Marketing Plan for Ideal Campaigns

SJWeaver keeps it simple with their Four Step Marketing Plan for Ideal Campaigns. However, there is actually complexity under the hood, so we’ll break it down into easy-to-swallow steps:

  • Step 1 : The Unique Selling Propositions/Points
  • Step 2 : The Platforms and Offers
  • Step 3 : The Marketing Arsenal
  • Step 4 : Marketing Automation

And if you’re more of a visual learner, they’ve compiled some solid videos that break down each step into more detail:

Screenshot of video content that can enhance your B2B marketing strategies.

While not purely focused on B2B, this marketing plan is great for anyone struggling to define their unique selling propositions or creating the automation needed to support their marketing.

#4: Brainrider’s B2B Content Marketing Strategy Template

Detailed and easy to understand, this plan runs through B2B marketing basics. This tool provides a framework or “skeleton”  for marketers to use as a template for their plans.

image3 2

The plan runs through prioritizing objectives and articulating your business goals to customers. It also focuses on targeting your audience and finally creating content for them.

In short, this is another highly-customizable B2B marketing plan. As long as you’ve got the framework, there’s no limit to what strategies you can test out, and start making a difference for your clients!

image4 2

#5: The Complete Guide to B2B Marketing

When Salesforce decides to throw their hat into the ring, people listen. Their Complete Guide to B2B Marketing is a great piece for beginning marketers and expert executors alike, and it includes beneficial checklists and actionable worksheets to incorporate with your team.

Below, you will find an example of a “Call-to-Action Checklist,” which is helpful for marketers to ensure that landing pages and blog content leave an impact and encourage their viewers to take action… every time.

Screenshot of Salesforce CTA checklist to enhance B2B marketing strategies.

B2B marketing strategies sometimes focus too narrowly on one aspect of the funnel without taking a holistic approach to your entire philosophy behind your marketing. This marketing plan helps you understand models that marketers need to make a great plan, tests theories in a real way and then enables you to learn and grow from those same exercises.

It’s a must-read for all B2B marketers and should become a roadmap for those losing their way in the digital world!

#6: Business-to-Business Marketing Summary by SAGE

The digital marketing template focuses mainly on the top internet marketing strategies .

The plan teaches readers to build a framework, communicate better, and also teaches many other skills that lead to successful B2B marketing. The most significant advantage of this sample plan is that it is widely comprehensive.

Different marketing strategy situations are explored. The most successful strategies are identified.

In short, this B2B marketing plan example hits all the right spots and won’t leave you confused.

#7: B2B Marketing Segmentation by Circle Research

Compiled and created by Circle Research , this plan is more of a “how to” that focuses on B2B market segmentation. It looks at case studies and different marketing plan approaches to inform and build new plans.

image6 2

The plan also breaks down segmentation.  You’ll find the following included:

  • Outlines the different approaches to segmentation in B2B environments.
  • Provides a step-by-step guide to adopting each approach.
  • Looks at how to effectively implement and action a segmentation model.
  • Offers links to B2B segmentation case studies.

The overall template offers an interesting look at B2B marketing plans through a different lens. Marketers can benefit from this slightly elevated approach after taking the time to dive in.

#8: Single Statement Templates from CMI

Single statement marketing plans are an actual thing. They may sound minimalist, but they are a solid way to stay focused.

Developed by Content Marketing Institute , single statement plans refer to creating an objective by establishing a single, active, mission statement for your campaign. The statement will be one that hits all the points and goals of your company. It should include  what you do, who you help, and why you help them .

Content Marketing Institute offers useful examples and templates for this plan. In a sort of “ad-lib” set up, marketers can fill in the blanks and create a statement that acts as a starting point for a marketing plan.

See an example of this below:

image7 2

#9: The Why.Who.How Workbook from CMI

This is another big find from Content Marketing Institute. Audience-focused B2B marketing plans  use your audience demographic to fuel content. The idea is to build a target audience with in-depth customer profiles. They should be focused to the point that each ICP (ideal customer profile) has a name, a job title, key concern, personality, interests, and age.

Example of B2B marketing plan to reach targeted demographic easier.

You can also give them a funnel position, the type of B2B needs they have, and what they care about in terms of metrics. The more your customer develops a well-rounded persona, the more you can take action to serve them better. This template is part of a larger whole, but it is a great starting point.

#10: The Essential Data-Driven Content Strategy from CMI

The last entry from Content Marketing Institute to discuss are  data-driven B2B marketing plans . Looking at your data is essential to craft your marketing plan and conquer your goals. Craft the plan backward by looking at the results of previous plans:

  • Take the data you have compiled and study it.
  • See what worked and what did not.
  • See what B2B customers responded to, and what fell flat.
  • See who your content reached, and where you could reach a bit more.

Data-driven B2B marketing plans are a way of fixing past mistakes to make stronger decisions moving forward. Reverse engineering your campaigns  from where your previous strategies have converted users is a great way to start your strategy off on the right foot.

These 10 B2B marketing plan examples should help you come up with plans of your own. The success of your business hinges on how well you market it and its services. By studying these plans, you can stay organized, find focus, and begin creating plans that work. If you want to know how we develop marketing plans backed by financial modeling, we’d love to get on a call.  Schedule a call  today to find out how our proven Customer Generation approach will bring your tech company results.

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B2B Marketing Plan

Your B2B Marketing Plan for 2024 (incl. Template)

16 february 2024 by jessie taylor.

There's plenty of resources out there for creating B2C and D2C marketing plans, but B2B companies seem to get left high and dry.

B2B companies, especially those in SaaS and tech like Leadfeeder , face different challenges and have different goals. You have to consider how your target audience and industry impact what marketing strategies are effective for your business.

So, we're going to share the process we're using to design our 2024 marketing plan. I hope this step-by-step guide (and marketing plan template!) will help you start the new year off right.

Note: Leadfeeder is the lead generation tool you've been dreaming of. Sign up for a free trial and start finding hidden, high-quality leads today.

Why do you need to create an updated B2B marketing plan?

Marketing is always evolving.

The strategies and tools you used this year might not help you get ahead next year. Even if the core tenets of marketing are the same (think lead generation , SEO, paid ads, and content marketing), the strategies and martech tools you use to implement a successful strategy may have.

When you think back, COVID-19 completely changed how many companies worked, who they hired, what goals they focused on, and even their revenue.

Covid economic activity chart

As a B2B company, it's crucial to be ready to adapt to whatever is going on in the world.

For example, with Leadfeeder by Dealfront, we use IP addresses to identify the companies visiting your site . During the pandemic, we had to change the way we track companies to make sure we were still accurate.

Other companies have changed the platforms they use, the ads they create, even the type of content they publish.

It's not a whole new world, but things have definitely changed.

To be successful, your 2024 marketing plan needs to match the new reality. Here's a five-step guide to get it right.

5 steps to create an updated B2B marketing plan 

B2B companies struggle to generate more leads, find effective marketing strategies and improve conversion rates . A well-planned marketing strategy can help you overcome those challenges.

Not sure where to start with your 2024 B2B marketing plan? This five-step guide will get you started. 

1. Examine your past marketing success and failures

Before you set goals for next year, consider what worked last year. Did your email marketing strategy kill it? Was your new lead generation tool a flop? Are paid ads spending more than they're bringing in?

You can also use tools like Leadfeeder (and obviously Google Analytics) to see what content your website visitors spent time-consuming vs. quickly bounced from. Hotjar could be another neat element to bring in to literally see where people hung out on the site.

I'm going to be honest — this step can be lengthy, but it's crucial to avoid wasting time and resources on strategies that don't work.

Review each segment of your marketing strategies and answer these questions:

What was the goal of this strategy?

Did we meet those goals? Why or why not?

What tools did we use? Did they meet our needs?

What can we improve? (Or, should we scrap this strategy entirely?)

2. Pay attention to new and changing marketing trends in 2024

No one can predict the future, but paying attention to the current marketing landscape is crucial to designing an effective 2024 marketing plan.

Here are a few trends our team is paying attention to this coming year:

Automation : Automation is taking over the marketing world. While we don't suggest turning your entire marketing strategy over to the robots, there are areas it can help, such as marketing automation tools , automated bidding for paid ads, and automated integrations that push data from one tool to another.

Machine learning and AI : This is an exciting field that just keeps growing. Machine learning and AI allow algorithms to analyze a set of data or rules and use it to understand unrelated data. AI helps B2B companies understand our customers better, personalize our marketing, predict changes in the industry, and inform content creation.

Personalization : There's been a permanent shift towards personalized marketing efforts. More than half of all consumers say they will keep buying from a company that offers a personalized experience. Consider adding it to your marketing plan.

Segment stat graphic

More (and better) content : B2B buyers read an average of 13 pieces of content before they decide to buy, so creating engaging content should still be a key part of your 2024 marketing plan.

SEO is still the reigning champ : Nope, SEO is not dead. In fact, Google is getting smarter and smarter. Pay attention to new SEO trends like natural language processing and passage ranking .

3. Review your buyer personas 

A good marketing plan is designed to move a specific customer through the buyer's journey. Do you know who your customers are?

At Leadfeeder, we actually have two main buyer personas — sales and marketing teams. We've found that most of our top customers derived from the marketing side, so we've adjusted our content and marketing strategies to focus on them.

And it's made a huge difference. We wouldn't have realized the shift if we hadn't taken the time to review our buyer personas and make sure we were targeting the right market.

4. Consider new marketing tools

There's a ton of marketing tools out there. (That might be an understatement.)

It's overwhelming, I know. Rather than trying all the new tools out there, take a look at your biggest challenges of the last year.

Where did you fall short? What took up most of your time? Where do you want to improve?

Then look for marketing and sales tools that specifically target those tasks.

For example, if finding leads is a problem, Leadfeeder can help. Using a small bit of code, we track who visits your site and show you how to reach out to them. It only takes a few minutes to set up and we have an awesome free trial .

Here's a peek at our dashboard, where you can see new leads, filter them by location, industry, etc., and view contact information:

Leadfeeder home page

Other tools we love include Pipedrive , a sales CRM and pipeline management tool, and Mailchimp, a killer email automation platform — we have an integration with both of these tools .

The point is to find marketing tools that solve problems for you, not just ones that pay for the most ads on LinkedIn.

5. Outline short and long-term goals

Now it's time to lay out some goals. What do you want to accomplish in the next year? Does that goal align with the overall business goals of your c-suite? It's important to outline both short and long-term goals to keep yourself on track.

For example, your long-term goal might be to increase lead generation by 24 percent in the coming year, while your first-quarter goal might be to implement a new lead gen tool and increase leads by 15 percent.

Having both goals creates a framework to reach that larger goal.

We like to use the SMART framework for goal setting to ensure goals are clear and trackable.

SMART goals guide from Leadfeeder

B2B marketing plan template

After following the steps above, you should have most of the information needed to create your 2024 B2B marketing plan.

This checklist will help you create a usable document:

Leadfeeder B2B marketing plan template

Success starts with a strong marketing plan

Creating a winning B2B marketing plan for 2024 is the key to growing your business in the new year. Yes, it can be time-consuming. But, investing the time now will ensure your team is ready to hit the ground running in January.

Note: Is lead generation part of your 2024 marketing plan? See how Leadfeeder can help you uncover hidden leads and turn them into customers. Sign up for your free 14-day trial today .

Jessie Taylor

Jessie works in Content Marketing and Social Media for 6+ years and creates authentic, brand-led content that helps turn target audience into customers.

Now that you're here

Leadfeeder is a tool that shows you companies that visit your website. Leadfeeder generates new leads, offers insight on your customers and can help you increase your marketing ROI.

If you liked this blog post, you'll probably love Leadfeeder, too.

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Highly Effective Business Plan Template For B2B Startups

Author Julie Williams

Julie Williams

  • September 14, 2022

Business Plan Template

Why Should You Download This Template?

  • You can think about every single step of your business.
  • Identify the right opportunities and deal with challenges.
  • Get an overview of your business and understand your target market
  • Plan your startup's future and make a roadmap for its success.
  • Get a structured way to organize your business ideas and goals.
  • Help entrepreneurs find weaknesses in their upcoming product or service ideas.

What is a Business Plan Template? 

A business plan template is the secret behind starting a successful B2B company. It serves several purposes if you plan to create a startup. A well-planned business plan will help you convince investors or lenders to finance your business. Startup business plan templates act as a step-by-step guide to building your startup and get concrete examples when approaching something for the first time.

It is a customized document that outlines how a company can achieve its objectives, such as gaining funding, obtaining a particular market share, or growing revenue. This template includes crucial elements that allow the startup founders to start with a solid foundation rather than from scratch. 

Take a Sneak Peek

Top-Business Plan Templates For Startup

What our Business Plan Template Includes

Business-Leaders

Business Leaders

Here, we will discuss the startup’s essential or primary decision-makers or business owners such as the CEO, COO, Vice President, President, and Managers.

Executive-summary

Executive Summary

 This will include information on the company, its products or services, mission statement and pricing details. You also have an option to add your management team’s roles and responsibilities, a business strategy and objectives.

Market-analysis

Market Analysis

It will help you analyze the target section of your target market, help you research the estimated market size, and find the target location. You will be able to understand the market in which your company will compete, find data on target market segments and keep up with industry trends.

Opportunities

Opportunities

Customer-Problems-Companies-solutions

Customer Problems & Companies Solutions

The customer analysis section will help you identify your target customer, understand the needs of your B2B clients and show how your products can solve their pain points.

Competition-analysis

Competition Analysis

SWOT-Analysis

SWOT Analysis

The strategic planning and management analysis technique identify your company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats related to your business competition or project planning.

Marketing-and-Sales-Plan

Marketing and Sales Plan

Operation-Plan

Operation Plan

The operational plan will discuss the internal strategies to build your business. It will outline employee’s needs, milestones, and processes.

Financial-Plan

Financial Plan

This part of the business plan will allow you to make financial projections based on a fixed budget. It includes templates for three key financial statements: An income statement, a balance sheet, and a cash-flow statement. 

Accomplishments

Accomplishments

In this section, you can add the accomplishments you expect your business to achieve, evidence of how your business is improving, and other strategies it can incorporate to grow better.

Metrics

Why is a Business Plan Important? 

  • Importance of your business plan is that it helps you test the viability of business ideas.
  • A business plan will create an effective strategy for your startup's growth.
  • To evaluate competitors in the target market and find your audience.
  • Help you get investments from venture capital, a bank, or personal investors.
  • Creating a business plan will determine which new employees are needed to assist with the daily tasks.
  • Plan for every phase of your business or scale an existing business to the next level.
  • Identify the pain points of customers and make personalized marketing plans.
  • Hire and build partnerships, which is very necessary for the early stages of your business.
  • Set marketing goals, strategies, and tactics you can implement in your multi-channel campaigns.
  • You can also scoop out the necessary steps you should take and adjust your investment of time and money accordingly.

How Will This Template be Beneficial For Your Business?

Best Business-Plan Templates 2022

The template will come with instructions written in a manner that is easy to follow, so all you have to do is fill in the blanks. You can adjust the template to suit your needs and don’t have to build an outline from scratch. 

You can navigate through daunting business jargon and create an effective plan. This free business plan template will benefit you in securing investors, designing an effective growth strategy, and understanding your startup’s future financial needs.

You can write a template with these simple steps:

  • Write the executive summary of your business idea
  • Add a company overview
  • Provide the problem and solution 
  • Identify the target market
  • Research your competition
  • Describe your product or service offerings
  • Outline your marketing tactics

Yes, this template is free. You only need to sign in and download the template. We promise that you won’t get a better free business plan templates for B2B startups.

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B2B Company Marketing Plan Template

  • Great for beginners
  • Ready-to-use, fully customizable Subcategory
  • Get started in seconds

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Ready to take your B2B marketing strategy to the next level? Look no further than ClickUp's B2B Company Marketing Plan Template! This complete template is designed specifically for B2B companies, helping you identify target markets, develop effective strategies, and achieve your business objectives with ease.

With ClickUp's B2B Company Marketing Plan Template, you'll be able to:

  • Define your target audience and understand their pain points
  • Craft tailored marketing strategies to reach and engage your ideal customers
  • Set clear goals and track your progress towards increasing brand awareness, generating leads, and driving sales
  • Collaborate with your team, assign tasks, and ensure everyone is aligned for success

Don't waste any more time trying to piece together your B2B marketing plan. Get started with ClickUp's template and watch your business soar to new heights!

Benefits of B2B Company Marketing Plan Template

The B2B Company Marketing Plan Template is a powerful tool that can help your marketing department achieve its goals and drive business growth. Here are just a few benefits of using this template:

  • Provides a clear roadmap for your marketing team, ensuring everyone is aligned and working towards the same objectives
  • Helps identify and target specific B2B markets, enabling you to focus your efforts and resources effectively
  • Guides the development of marketing strategies and tactics that resonate with your target audience, increasing brand awareness and generating quality leads
  • Enables you to track and measure the success of your marketing initiatives, allowing for continuous improvement and optimization

Main Elements of B2B Company Marketing Plan Template

ClickUp's B2B Company Marketing Plan template is the perfect tool to streamline your marketing efforts and achieve your goals. Here are the key elements that make this template effective:

  • Custom Statuses: Track the progress of your marketing tasks with 6 predefined statuses, including Cancelled, Complete, In Progress, Needs Input, Planned, and To Do.
  • Custom Fields: Utilize 6 custom fields such as Quarter, Task Type, Impact, Progress, Percent Completion, and Effort to capture important details and metrics for each task.
  • Custom Views: Access 5 different views tailored to your needs, including Key Results, Timeline, Getting Started Guide, Objectives, and Progress Board, allowing you to visualize your marketing plan from different perspectives.
  • Collaboration Features: Leverage ClickUp's collaboration features such as assigning tasks, commenting, and file attachments to ensure seamless communication and teamwork within your marketing team.
  • Goal Tracking: Set and monitor your marketing objectives using ClickUp's Goals feature, which allows you to align your marketing efforts with your overall business strategy.

How to Use Marketing Plan for B2B Company

Creating a comprehensive marketing plan for your B2B company is crucial for driving growth and success. By utilizing the B2B Company Marketing Plan Template in ClickUp and following the steps outlined below, you can develop a strategic and effective marketing plan that will help you achieve your business goals.

1. Define your target audience

To start, it's important to clearly define your target audience. Understand who your ideal B2B customers are, their pain points, challenges, and motivations. This will help you tailor your marketing efforts and messaging to resonate with your target audience.

Use the custom fields feature in ClickUp to create categories for your target audience, including industry, company size, job title, and pain points.

2. Set clear marketing objectives

Determine the specific objectives you want to achieve with your marketing plan. Are you looking to increase brand awareness, generate leads, or drive conversions? Setting clear and measurable marketing objectives will help you stay focused and track your progress.

Utilize the Goals feature in ClickUp to set SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) goals for each objective.

3. Develop your marketing strategies and tactics

Based on your target audience and objectives, develop a range of marketing strategies and tactics that will help you reach your goals. Consider using a mix of digital marketing, content marketing, social media, email marketing, and events to maximize your reach and engagement.

Use the Board view in ClickUp to create cards for each marketing strategy or tactic, and assign team members responsible for executing each task.

4. Create a marketing budget

Allocate a budget for your marketing activities to ensure you have the necessary resources to implement your strategies. Consider factors such as advertising costs, content creation, marketing tools, and team training. Having a well-defined budget will help you make informed decisions and optimize your marketing efforts.

Utilize the Table view in ClickUp to create a budget spreadsheet, track expenses, and monitor your spending.

5. Monitor, analyze, and optimize

Once your marketing plan is in action, it's important to continuously monitor and analyze your performance. Keep track of key metrics such as website traffic, lead generation, conversion rates, and ROI. Identify what's working well and what needs improvement, and make data-driven optimizations to maximize your marketing effectiveness.

Use the Dashboards feature in ClickUp to create visual reports and track your marketing metrics in real-time.

By following these steps and utilizing the B2B Company Marketing Plan Template in ClickUp, you can develop a well-structured and effective marketing plan that will drive growth and success for your B2B company.

add new template customization

Get Started with ClickUp’s B2B Company Marketing Plan Template

B2B marketing teams can use this Marketing Plan Template to streamline their marketing efforts and effectively reach their target audience.

First, hit “Add Template” to sign up for ClickUp and add the template to your Workspace. Make sure you designate which Space or location in your Workspace you’d like this template applied.

Next, invite relevant members or guests to your Workspace to start collaborating.

Now you can take advantage of the full potential of this template to create a comprehensive marketing plan:

  • Use the Key Results view to track and measure the success of your marketing campaigns
  • The Timeline view will help you visualize your marketing activities and deadlines
  • Refer to the Getting Started Guide view to understand how to effectively use this template
  • Utilize the Objectives view to set clear goals and objectives for your marketing plan
  • Use the Progress Board view to track the progress of each marketing task
  • Organize tasks into six different statuses: Cancelled, Complete, In Progress, Needs Input, Planned, To Do, to keep track of progress
  • Update statuses as you work through tasks to keep team members informed of progress
  • Monitor and analyze tasks to ensure maximum productivity and successful marketing campaigns.

Related Templates

  • Consulting Firm Marketing Plan Template
  • Sewing Business Marketing Plan Template
  • Limousine Service Marketing Plan Template
  • Mobile Phone Marketing Plan Template
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Free B2B marketing plan template (+ tips and best practices)

Free B2B marketing plan template (+ tips and best practices)

Before we get started, here is the free B2B marketing plan template you're looking for, which you do not need to fill out a form to get. Really, it's yours:

You need to make a copy of the document to use it .

Now, let's dig into a few details you need to know before you get started building out your rockstar marketing plan for your B2B company.

A marketing plan is more than content

I think when people get started with content marketing , they think their content strategy is the entirety of their strategy. While a content strategy is, indeed, a large piece of the proverbial marketing pie, it is not actually the entire pie.

Mmm, pie. Now I'm hungry. Is it Thanksgiving, yet?  🦃

Your company's marketing plan should encompass so much more beyond your content — although your content is very important:

  • Email marketing campaigns and newsletters
  • Social media marketing
  • Paid media and social advertising
  • Events (virtual and in-person)

That's why you need to have a marketing plan, scoped out on an annual basis, with regular updates (as necessary). But your marketing plan isn't just a means to delineate what your campaigns are. It's so much more than that.

What is the purpose of a marketing plan?

The best marketing plans, no matter what industry you're in, all accomplish the same three things (based on a defined period of time):

  • They provide a clear overview of what goals your marketing efforts will achieve over a specific period of time, across the entire company.
  • Each objective has measurable, specific goals that correspond to your company's overall mission and purpose, with defined milestone points at each stage (activation, acquisition, and expansion).
  • For every objective, at every stage, you see how each element of your marketing (social, content, email, etc.) all come together holistically to help you achieve your goals. 

Why is this B2B marketing plan template based on account-based marketing?

The free B2B marketing plan template above is based on the principles of account-based marketing . Account-based marketing takes the traditional B2B sales and marketing funnel and turns it on its head by going after “qualified” leads rather than letting them filter themselves. 

Whereas inbound marketing starts with organic lead generation, account-based marketing starts by identifying and targeting key decision-makers within accounts which have the potential to bring the biggest revenue to your business. 

That being said, we do not view the principles of ABM and inbound or content marketing to be mutually exclusive. In fact, create content that answers the most pressing questions of your ideal buyers (as you would in a content marketing strategy), is still critical to the success of your B2B marketing plan.

With an ABM approach, however, your content will simply be more targeted to what is called your ideal buyer profile . As a note, you need to create your ideal buyer profile first before you get started. And no, it is not the same as a buyer persona.

(It's an efficient exercise though, so don't panic.)

How do you create a B2B marketing plan with an ABM approach?

The best ABM-based B2B marketing plans have their efforts broken out into three specific stages :

  • Acquisition This stage is for bringing net-new accounts into your pipeline. Most companies focus a lot of their efforts in this stage.
  • Acceleration Once you have engaged accounts in your pipeline. You are either keeping them engaged or potentially reviving what was previously a dead deal. Techniques, such as personalization, is really helpful here. 
  • Expansion Expansion is all about retaining, upselling, and expanding relationships and service agreements with your existing customer base. Like the old saying goes, it's easier to win business from existing clients than to attract new ones.

That's why each section of the B2B marketing plan template is broken out into those three phases, based on the specific service/product objectives you outline in the beginning of your plan. That way you see how, at each interaction phase, you are targeting your marketing efforts to meet your goals. 

What are the benefits of an ABM approach to B2B marketing?

In addition to going after qualified leads right at the start, instead of having them self-select and identify their fit for your products and services, there are four key benefits to an ABM approach to B2B marketing:

  • It personalizes the experience for your buyers , because your marketing campaigns are less broad. Instead, they're more targeted and focused on the specific needs and pain points of your ideal buyers.
  • You build trust and long-term relationships by networking with people within accounts and transforming them into advocates — a big deal since a 5% increase can lead to an increase in profits of up to 95% .
  • It shortens and streamlines the sales process because you're already dealing with more qualified leads that require less nurturing. Your sales team will also waste less time with bad-fit prospects, because they won't be targeted in the first place.
  • You'll align your sales and marketing teams because ABM is, simply put, a business growth strategy that holistically aligns your sales and marketing teams around the same goals and objectives. 

How to make your B2B marketing plan a winner

As the marketing leader at your company, creating a winning marketing plan is a unique challenge. When done right, your people will love you for helping to grow the business with a clear strategy.

When done incorrectly, however, you can find yourself in a very lonely place, with a big document and nothing much else to show for it.

So, how do you avoid the latter? 

  • Do not write your marketing plan on your own. Talk to leadership, sales, and different segments of your business. Leadership will help you align on what your goals and objectives should be. Sales will help you with the finer details of your plan — realistic goal-setting, ideal buyer profiles, etc. Anyone you list as a stakeholder should be someone who gives feedback.
  • Take your time to create your marketing plan. A great marketing plan isn't written overnight by candlelight. It takes time, requires lots of collaboration, and is too important to be rushed. Instead, make it a four- to six-week initiative, with a clear delivery date. Then, have specific milestones, such as a first draft for leadership review, a draft for cross-department collaboration, and so on.
  • Be as thorough as possible the first time you write it. From experience, I know how writing massive, 20+ page documents can feel tedious and draining — even if you're totally bought in on the outcome. Don't cut corners. For example, you may be tempted to say, "Oh, I'll note exactly what happens in this nurturing sequence when it comes time to do it." Don't do that. Do it now.

Again, yes, it is a ton of work. But trust me when I say you'll thank yourself for all of the effort you put into it. Instead of scrambling at each stage — "What should this workflow include? What social media campaigns do we need to run? Crap, did we even think about paid media?" — you'll simply be ready to execute

On top of that, you'll know already that your logic is sound and vetted by other teams, including your leadership. Which means, more buy-in for the work you're doing.

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b2b business plan examples

Examples

B2B Marketing Business Plan

b2b business plan examples

B2B or business-to-business marketing is one of the strategic approaches that businesses incorporate in their operational activities. As technological innovation grows rampantly in this digital age, your company has to learn several more ways on how to tap new markets and get the loyalty of your current market hold. The processes involved in B2B marketing allow establishments and organizations to get a wider market reach and bigger lead generation. A B2B marketing plan can help you a lot if you want to ensure that all your action plans, strategies, and tactics are aligned with your vision.

  • Financial Advisor Marketing Plan Examples – PDF
  • Social Media Marketing Plan Examples – PDF

B2B Marketing Plan Template

B2B Marketing Plan Template

  • Google Docs

Size: US, A4

Not knowing anything about the development of a B2B marketing business plan should not be treated as a disadvantage. You can learn how to create one with the help of resources, references, and guides. For one, we have listed a number of B2B marketing business plan examples in PDF that you can use whenever you need help in developing both the content and format of your own document.

B2B Content Marketing for a Business Plan Example

B2B Content Marketing for a Business Plan Example 01

B2B Content Marketing Business Plan Example

B2B Content Marketing Business Plan Example 01

Complete B2B Marketing Business Plan and Guide Example

Complete B2B Marketing Business Plan and Guide Example 01

Why Is It Necessary to Have a B2B Marketing Business Plan?

Just by looking at the executive summary of a marketing plan , you should already have an idea on how the entire marketing business plan can potentially affect your operations—especially if it can cover all the key points of concern of the business about its marketing actions and activities. However, you still need to thoroughly review the entire marketing business plan to ensure that call-to-actions are realistic and attainable.

If you are tasked to develop a B2B marketing business plan, an executive summary is one of the last things that you need to create as you first need to be knowledgeable of all the areas of the document before you can summarize it accordingly. More so, you should also know the purpose of the B2B marketing business plan so you can be well-guided within its drafting phases. A few of the reasons why it is necessary for you to create and use a B2B marketing business plan are as follows:

  • A B2B marketing business plan can help you properly focus on the milestones that you want to achieve. The definition of your success measures can help you prioritize call-to-actions that are essential for your growth and development. Moreover, this can make you more strategic and tactical when it comes to dealing with other businesses for your marketing needs, requests, and requirements.
  • A B2B marketing plan can present an analysis of your current marketing condition. This can then be compared to the state where you would like to be within the marketplace in relation to relevance, presence, and visibility. Through this, you can ensure that any business-to-business marketing decisions that you will come up with are truly beneficial to your business.
  • A B2B marketing plan allows you to answer relevant questions and look into existing concerns and issues. Giving commitment to your B2B marketing strategies and tactics with the help of a B2B marketing business plan can make it more efficient for you to communicate and connect with other businesses and your audience.

B2B Marketing: Revised Model of Marketing and Communications Effects Example

B2B Marketing Revised Model of Marketing and Communications Effects Example 001

B2B Marketing Business Plan Example

B2B Marketing Business Plan Example 01

Size: 366 KB

Project of a Marketing Plan for a B2B Company Example

Project of a Marketing Plan for a B2B Company Example 01

Size: 166 KB

Thinking of Making a B2B Marketing Business Plan?

Business-to-business marketing allows one business to sell its offers to another business. In this manner, buyers or the businesses that will transact with one another can properly distinguish the profit potential of working with one another to achieve marketing goals. If you want to create a B2B marketing business plan that will set the direction of the entire transaction, here are some of the things that you should always remember:

  • You have to keep in mind the B2B marketing gives importance to the creation and maintenance of professional relationships that are built from trust, credibility, and business interests. Hence, you have to value not only the integrity of your business but the goals and desires of your business partners as well. Whether you are a small establishment or a big corporation, you have to ensure that you will prioritize the business relationships that you have so you can set a strong foundation when implementing the B2B marketing business plan that you have developed.
  • Know how to select your audience. There are different types of customers that you can acquire in B2B marketing processes. Knowing the market that you would like to target can help you develop strategies and action plans that will surely get their attention. Compared to a business-to-consumer transaction, you are actually not dealing with individuals but groups. As an example, a few of your target customers can be companies who need your products to develop theirs, government agencies, medical facilities, academic institutions, and wholesalers.
  • Ensure that you will align your B2B marketing business plan with your annual marketing plan . It is essential for all your marketing documents to work together for a common goal. Lapses in objectives and plan application can weaken the activities and efforts that you will execute, so you have to ensure that your B2B marketing business plan is well-developed and incorporated in your other marketing planning documents.

B2B Digital Marketing Plan for a Micro Design Company Example

B2B Digital Marketing Plan For a Micro Design Company Example 01

B2B Marketing and Branding Business Plan Example

B2B Marketing and Branding Business Plan Example 01

Size: 303 KB

Factors That Can Affect B2B Marketing Business Plan Development

In comparison to a  nonprofit marketing plan , a B2B marketing business plan actually goes on the different route as it needs to provide sales leads and profitability to the business once the approved document is already up for implementation. Hence, the delivery of work actions and its application to business operations must be directly developed based on the needs and expectations of specific customers.

Once you have already decided to create a B2B marketing business plan, you have to remember that the process of developing this document is not the same when your focus in consumer marketing. Aside from having a smaller audience to focus on as the target market is very particular, there are also some factors that can affect the planning and development phases of the B2B marketing business plan. Here are some of the factors that you need to consider when drafting this document:

  • The products, services, and offers that you can provide to other businesses for the B2B marketing transaction be realized
  • The target businesses that you would like to work with especially those that are within the same industry where your business belongs
  • The strategies and tactics that you will use to deliver your marketing and business message in a direct and straightforward manner
  • The time frame in which B2B marketing activities will be implemented
  • The promotional and advertising activities that you will use so you can get the attention of your target audience
  • The pricing strategies and other financial concerns that you need to look into to for case revenue potential and value of returns
  • The benefits that the transaction can provide to the businesses whom you will be working with within the entirety of the B2B marketing processes specified in the business plan

Digital Marketing Plan for a B2B Company Example

Digital Marketing Plan For a B2B Company Example 01

Size: 553 KB

B2B Marketing Business Plan Guide Example

B2B Marketing Business Plan Guide Example 1

Size: 579 KB

Tips in Making a Successful B2B Marketing Business Plan

Creating a B2B marketing business plan from scratch is not easy. However, there are some guidelines that will allow you to efficiently maximize your efforts and time when developing the specified document. Here are some tips that can help make an outstanding and effective marketing business plan:

  • Understand the context of B2B marketing and identify the ways on how it can benefit your business.
  • Ensure that your goals and objectives are measurable and time-bound so you can have an idea on how to develop steps that can help you achieve the things that you would like to get at the end of the transaction.
  • Develop quality standards and metrics for evaluation that can help you evaluate the impacts and effects of the B2B marketing business plan to your business especially in terms of profitability.
  • Review the document before signing it or sending it to the concerned entities who will evaluate the content of the B2B marketing business plan .

Use references like templates and examples so that it will be faster for you to come up with an effective and well-laid-out document. Download any of the examples that we have listed in this post and start making your own B2B marketing business plan.

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Sales Plan

How to Create a B2B Sales Plan: Template + Examples

A sales plan is an essential tool for any business, especially in B2B. It provides a roadmap for achieving your sales goals. By clearly outlining your strategies and tactics, a well-crafted sales plan will keep you on track and help you measure your progress along the way.

Creating a sales plan can seem daunting, but it doesn’t have to be. This article lays out a structure for a sales plan. We will extend this article over time.

In this post, we’ll cover

What is a sales plan, what is the sales planning process, what are typical elements of a sales plan, executive summary, key assumptions for this sales plan (examples), target customers and related products / services, business planing, initiatives and measures, required resources, overall outcome of a sales plan, sales plan in one sentence, sales plan examples.

A sales plan is a document that encompasses goals, target customers, and sales strategy aimed at attaining necessary results. It enables a company’s leadership and sales team to plan concrete measures and initiatives to achieve the defined business outcomes as well as predict business-related risks and steps to avoid them.

  • Gather historic sales data
  • Define your objectives including existing business plans
  • Define your assumptions going into sales planning
  • Determine metrics for success
  • Determine current situation
  • Start sales forecasting based on current performance
  • Identify gaps to success metrics and business plan
  • Ideate new initiatives to close gaps
  • Involve stakeholders for feedback
  • Outline action items and determine ressource requirements

A typical sales plan includes the following sections:

  • Key assumptions
  • Revenue Targets, Business Plan
  • Strategies and Tactics (incl. Marketing initiatives)
  • Pricing and Promotions, marketing and sales channels
  • Deadlines and responsibiliites
  • Team structure
  • Market Conditions

Structure of sales strategy / quarterly sales plan

A structured sales plan provides clarity and guidance in a turbulent environment. Based on over 100 projects, we provide you with a suggested structure to map out specific goals, action items, and target dates for progress.

  • What targets will you hit
  • Which measures are you taking
  • Which (incremental) ressources do you need
  • Focus on product A and region B to generate the revenues
  • Keep existing product mix
  • Product improvements / innovation
  • Other departments plans / confirmed actions
  • Customer segments, ABC-analysis
  • Geographical split
  • Market size and penetration today and in future
  • Performance based on previous performance (“bottom-up 1”) potentially: variance analysis of actual results vs. plan of previous timeframe
  • Performance based on realistic & ambitious estimates from managerial experience (“bottom-up 2”)
  • top-down targets from business plan (communicated towards shareholders) (“top-down”)
  • Gap analysis between today “bottom-up 1”, “bottom-up 2” and “top-down”
  • Decision, which plan (named “ sales plan “) will be basis for next timeframe
  • number of resources / seller
  • avg. revenue per deal
  • ramp-up time per seller
  • target achievement per seller
  • product / country / margin mix
  • Employee churn
  • Customer churn
  • As needed: “sales plan” breakdown to quarters, months, weeks and days.
  • As needed: breakdown “sales plan” to teams and individuals incl. 10-20% buffer for every hierachy level
  • Prepare: Development of measures to fill gap to get to “sales plan”

sales plan progressive

  • 3-5 key initiatives to deliver the “sales plan” as outlined above
  • Each initiative is linked to 3-7 specific measures linked to metrics and financial outcomes
  • employee churn
  • customer churn
  • Each measure is linked to one person responsible and has a clear timline
  • Ideally: every initiative can be measured by specific KPIs (to see if progress is made)
  • FTE resources Marketing
  • FTE resources Sales
  • Budgets (team, budget for marketing, new tools or incentives / SPIFFs)
  • IT support for implementation of new sales tools
  • Product management for changes to product / services
  • Customer Success / Account Management
  • Which marketing channels will be used
  • Which sales channels will be used
  • Overview: which team approaches what type of customers through which channel and which product / service offering
  • Planning of all initiatives and tasks for upcoming timeframe incl. responsibilities
  • Financial planning sales / P&L in collaboration with controlling department
  • Overview of all requirements to other departments / companies and shareholders to achieve the plan
  • Outlook for timeframe following the planned timeframe (t+1)
We will achieve an overall goal of 1,3 m€ in net new ARR in Q1/23. For this I need 500 k€ (in budget and headcount, 100 k€ incremental budget required) and the defined support from the organization / shareholders.

Over time, we will link examples of sales plans in this section.

Jens Hutzschenreuter

Jens Hutzschenreuter

Jens is a previous B2B Sales leader (Groupon, ryd), ex-Management Consultant with Boston Consulting Group and is now supporting ~50 B2B sales organizations annually in developing systems, structure and processes to scale an organization up to 250 sellers.

How to Build a Strong Operations Strategy for Your B2B Company

Lucy Fuggle

Published: October 01, 2021

While there will always be fires to put out and short-term issues to tend to at any company, it's essential to take a step back and focus on the bigger picture. This means looking to your business operations and creating a strategy that primes your B2B organization for success.

marketing team building a strong operations strategy for their business

Entrepreneur, angel investor, and former host of the reality show, "The Profit," Marcus Lemonis, is a seasoned pro when it comes to spotting marketing opportunities and avoiding business failure.

Download Now: Free Growth Strategy Template

He also coined "the 3 P's of success" :

According to Lemonis, the 3 P's are fundamentals that every business needs to get right. If those fundamentals aren't in place, success will be an uphill struggle.

Building a robust B2B operation is all about getting those three P's in the right place.

Business Operations Definition

Business operations are everything that happens within your company to keep it running and profitable.

In most business plans, a specific section is devoted to business operations needed to make an organization function. These include:

While your business model is a description of what you want to achieve, business operations are the practical execution.

Even if you already have processes in place, for the best results in your B2B company you need to be intentional about your ops and create a clear strategy that's regularly optimized.

Functions of B2B Business Operations

Although the ins-and-outs of business operations can differ substantially depending on the industry and size of a company, most of these functions remain relevant to any type of business:

  • Maintaining efficient internal communications and striving for alignment around goals and how to reach them
  • Providing senior-level managers with the information and coaching they need
  • Continuously auditing and optimizing business processes
  • Managing budget and planning processes
  • Monitoring third-party cooperation and software integrations

If you hire a Head of Operations, these are all focus points they will need to stay on top of and continuously improve. Otherwise, these tasks can be divided between the most relevant people on your team.

The Different Roles of B2B Business Operations

While a Head of Operations is responsible for business operations at the highest level, it's common to appoint mid-level roles within different departments of an organization.

Sales Ops entail all the business activities and processes that help your company's sales run efficiently and in line with your business objectives.

Marketing Ops is a role or team focused on enabling the marketing team to operate and scale efficiently with the right people, processes, and tech.

Support Ops , like the other ops roles, works behind the scenes to provide the tools, integrations, and processes that enable support teams to succeed.

Running the operations of a B2B company can be challenging, and requires the ability to analyze and evaluate processes and performance on both a macro and micro level.

To help you implement the most impactful business ops strategy for your B2B company, read on for eight pointers for success.

8 Best Practices for Successful B2B Business Operations

1. communicate clearly — and choose the right tech..

Everything starts and ends with good internal communications. In fact, a recent study found that 89% of respondents believe effective communication is incredibly important in a business setting.

Establishing the right processes for communication is a crucial key to business success, and since team members today mostly rely on technology to communicate and collaborate, choosing the right communication tools is equally important.

2. Define team expectations and accountability.

Clear expectations for each team member, as well as clear accountability, are foundational for success. Regularly setting tasks, deadlines, and planning together is an integral part of business operations, as well as following up on and evaluating results and performance.

3. Document and automate processes.

Documenting all processes and sharing them with the organization saves a lot of time and effort. Documentation prevents the need to "reinvent the wheel" again and again and provides a common ground and point of reference that can then be further developed.

What's even better is when your documentation and data are readily available to your team members. Integrating your different tools and syncing your contacts will make workflows run smoother and with less effort.

4. Integrate your tech stack.

An important part of business operations is maintaining a helicopter perspective on technical solutions and platforms. By choosing tools that are optimal for your needs, avoiding redundant functionalities, and integrating your different systems, you set your various departments up for success.

5. Strive for transparency.

It's essential to have cross-functional collaboration that breaks down silos and aligns departments around common goals. Alternatively, failure to create transparency results in redundant work, misaligned priorities, and missed opportunities for collaboration, so getting this one right is worth the effort.

Some effective tactics for any B2B business include regular cross-departmental meetings and the right communication tools to facilitate collaboration.

6. Base decisions on data.

Because business operations involve various stakeholders and agendas, it's vital to maintain an objective view of how efficient your operations are and to agree on how to define and measure success.

When creating your B2B ops strategy, take time to assess how well you are:

  • Running a data-driven operation with high data integrity and reliability
  • Basing decisions on facts and figures rather than hunches and gut feel
  • Creating regular reports and sharing them with all stakeholders

7. Collect feedback from teams.

An efficient feedback loop where team members can deliver their insights and comments to management is invaluable. Regular surveys and a strong team culture that invites feedback are great places to start.

Of course, only collecting the feedback is not enough; it needs to be followed up and acted on as well. How can you ensure this in your B2B ops strategy?

8. Consider hiring a Head of Operations.

Ownership of your B2B ops is crucial, and it pays to have someone accountable for maintaining the smooth running of your organization.

If you can, hire a person who owns your business ops and is responsible for continuously evaluating and optimizing the three P's: processes, people, and product.

Agree on metrics to measure success, and follow up regularly to make sure you're maximizing your business's potential. You can also think about how your ops strategy trickles down to each department for the most impact and productivity.

How will you strengthen your B2B operations?

Every business is different, and you need to look at your specific company to evaluate what your needs are. But if you check all these eight boxes, you should be well on your way to a best-in-class B2B business operation.

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Whether you’re a seasoned marketer or a business owner looking to boost your company’s presence, a comprehensive B2B marketing plan can be a game-changer. A crucial element contributing to marketing effectiveness is understanding how your products bring value to your customers’ businesses. It’s not just a statement you are putting out there with well-crafted content but substantiating it. 

To ensure that you can explicitly demonstrate how your products can minimize costs, enhance competitive advantages, or boost productivity for your customers you need an effective plan. Failing to plan, execute and demonstrate the value of your product or service can turn your strategy and brand into nothing more than another marketing gimmick.

In this guide, we’ll discuss what is a B2B marketing plan, discover essential tips for creating one, showcase real-world examples, and provide you with a basic B2B digital marketing plan template to get you started. 

What is a B2B Marketing Plan? 

A B2B marketing plan is a strategic roadmap that outlines the steps a business will take to promote its products or services to other companies. Unlike business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing, business-to-business (B2B) marketing targets a specific audience of decision-makers within organizations. The primary goal of a B2B marketing plan is to generate leads, nurture prospects, and ultimately convert them into loyal customers.

develop a b2b marketing plan

Key Components of a B2B Marketing Plan

Define your marketing goals.

Establish measurable and realistic marketing goals. Whether it’s increasing brand awareness, driving lead generation, or boosting sales. Your goals should align with your overall business objectives. Be specific and realistic about your goals using the (SMART) criteria – specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound to track your progress.

Undertake a Market Analysis

Begin by conducting a thorough analysis of your target market. Identify your total addressable market (TAM) and assess the competitive landscape. Understand potential customers’ pain points and determine how your products or services can address those needs.

Segment Your Target Audience and Create Buyer Personas

Create detailed buyer personas representing your ideal customers. Understand their roles, responsibilities, challenges, and motivations. This will help tailor your marketing messages to resonate with your target audience. Segmentation recognizes that different groups will respond differently to content and messages. First, determine whether segmentation is necessary based on the identified audience(s) and their characteristics. Segmentation is recommended if the audience cannot be reached effectively with the same messages and channels and/or certain segments have significantly different worldviews, needs, and approaches.

Have a Laid-out Marketing Strategy

Develop overarching strategies that align with your goals. This may involve content marketing, email marketing, social media advertising, and influencer marketing. Each strategy should contribute to achieving specific marketing objectives.

Clearly Define Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)

What sets your business apart from the competition? Your USP should communicate the unique value your products or services bring to the table. 

Write Content and Choose Your Channels

Dive into the specific tactics and channels you’ll leverage to execute your strategies. This could include creating engaging content, optimizing your website for search engines, running targeted Google Ads campaigns, and utilizing various social media platforms. 

Allocate your Marketing Budget

Allocate resources effectively by establishing a marketing budget. Consider the costs associated with advertising, content creation, marketing tools, and any other expenses related to your marketing initiatives.

Establish a Timeline

Create a timeline that outlines the timing of each marketing initiative. This will help you stay organized and coordinate your efforts for maximum impact. 

Define key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the success of your marketing activities. Regularly track and analyze metrics like website traffic, conversion rates, and social media engagement to gauge the effectiveness of your efforts.  A successful B2B marketing plan is dynamic and adaptable. Regularly review your performance metrics, gather feedback, and be prepared to adjust your strategies and tactics based on the insights you gain.

10 Tips on How to Create a B2B Marketing Plan 

marketing tips

Creating an effective B2B marketing plan requires careful consideration and strategic thinking. Here are ten tips to guide you through the process: 

Understand Your Target Audience

Knowing your audience is paramount in B2B marketing. Conduct in-depth research to understand the challenges, pain points, and priorities of your target businesses. This knowledge will shape your marketing messages and strategies. 

segment your target audience

Align Marketing with Sales

A successful B2B marketing plan aligns closely with the sales process. Collaborate with your sales team to understand their needs, share insights, and ensure marketing efforts support the entire buyer’s journey. 

Understand the duration of your buying process and stay updated when it changes. This awareness allows you to report on these shifts and, more importantly, adapt your strategy to maintain a consistently robust sales funnel. 

Create Compelling Content

Content is king in B2B marketing. Develop high-quality, relevant content that educates, informs, and engages your audience. This could include blog posts, white papers, case studies, videos, etc. 

create a content

Utilize Multiple Marketing Channels

B2B buyers engage with content across various channels. Incorporate a mix of channels such as social media, email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), and offline events to reach your audience effectively.  

Implement Marketing Automation

Marketing automation tools can streamline repetitive tasks, nurture leads, and provide valuable insights. Invest in a marketing automation platform that aligns with your business needs and integrates seamlessly with your existing systems. 

Stay Informed About Industry Trends

B2B marketing is dynamic, with trends and technologies evolving rapidly. Stay informed about the latest industry trends, emerging technologies, and shifts in buyer behavior to ensure your marketing strategies remain relevant. 

Optimize for Search Engines

Enhance your online visibility by optimizing your website for search engines (SEO). Conduct keyword research, create relevant meta tags, and regularly update your content to improve your website’s ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs). 

Measure and Analyze Performance

Regularly track and analyze key performance indicators (KPIs) to assess the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. Use analytics tools to gain insights into website traffic, conversion rates, and other relevant metrics. 

Happy customers can be your most powerful advocates. Encourage and showcase customer testimonials, case studies, and success stories to build trust and credibility within your target market. 

10 B2B Marketing Plan Examples

marketing plan from big business

Now that you know how to plan your marketing, let’s look at some B2B companies doing it right across various industries. 

HubSpot : HubSpot’s inbound marketing methodology focuses on attracting, engaging, and delighting customers. Their B2B marketing plan emphasizes content creation, email marketing, and marketing automation. 

Salesforce: Salesforce leverages a multi-channel marketing approach, combining content marketing, social media advertising, and community engagement. Their B2B marketing plan emphasizes building strong customer relationships through personalized experiences. 

IBM: IBM’s B2B marketing plan revolves around thought leadership and educational content. They invest heavily in creating white papers, webinars, and case studies to position themselves as industry leaders. 

Adobe : Adobe’s marketing plan highlights the power of visual storytelling. They use video content, interactive experiences, and creative campaigns to highlight the capabilities of their software products. 

Cisco: Cisco’s marketing plan focuses on a comprehensive digital strategy. They utilize social media, content marketing, and online communities to connect with their audience and provide valuable insights. 

Mailchimp : Mailchimp’s marketing plan is centered on user-friendly content and community building. They emphasize the importance of customer education through blog posts, tutorials, and engaging events. 

Oracle: Oracle’s B2B marketing plan integrates various channels, including social media, email marketing, and influencer partnerships. Their approach emphasizes the importance of personalized communication and targeted campaigns. 

SAP : SAP’s B2B marketing strategies center around customer success stories and case studies. They showcase the real-world impact of their solutions through in-depth narratives that resonate with their target audience. 

Microsoft: Microsoft’s marketing plan is characterized by a strong emphasis on thought leadership and innovation. They use a combination of events, webinars, and educational content to position themselves as industry pioneers. 

LinkedIn: As a B2B platform, LinkedIn’s marketing plan is built around professional networking and content sharing. They provide businesses with tools for targeted advertising, lead generation, and brand building within a B2B context. 

These examples illustrate the diverse approaches that successful B2B companies take in their marketing strategies. Analyze these cases to draw inspiration for your own B2B marketing plan. 

Best B2B Marketing Plan Template 

Crafting a marketing plan for B2B from scratch can be overwhelming, but having a template can simplify the process. Here’s a basic B2B marketing plan template to guide you: 

Executive Summary 

  • Business Overview: Provide a brief overview of your company’s mission and core values. 
  • Key Objectives: Clearly state your marketing plan’s primary objectives. 

Market Analysis

  • Total Addressable Market (TAM): Define the size and characteristics of your target market. 
  • Competitive Analysis: Assess the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors. 
  • Buyer Personas: Create detailed personas representing your ideal customers. 
  • Unique Selling Proposition (USP) 
  • USP Definition: Clearly articulate what sets your business apart from competitors. 

Marketing Goals 

  • SMART Goals: Set specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound marketing goals. 
  • Content Marketing : It is a best practice to outline your marketing tactics for creating and distributing valuable content. 
  • Social Media Marketing : Detail how you plan to leverage social media for brand promotion. 
  • Email Marketing : Specify your approach to email marketing and lead nurturing. 
  • Influencer Marketing : If relevant, explain how you’ll collaborate with influencers in your industry. 

Tactics and Channels 

  • Content Creation: Specify the types of content you’ll produce and the platforms you’ll use. 
  • SEO Strategy: Describe your approach to optimizing your website for search engines. 
  • Paid Advertising: Detail your plans for running paid advertising campaigns. 
  • Events and Sponsorships: If applicable, outline your strategy for participating in industry events. 

Marketing Budget 

  • Allocations: Break down your budget across different marketing initiatives. 

Timeline 

  • Marketing Calendar: Provide a visual representation of when each marketing initiative will occur. 

Metrics and Analytics 

  • Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): Define the metrics you’ll track to measure success. 
  • Analytics Tools: Specify the tools you’ll use to gather and analyze performance data. 

Adjustment and Optimization 

  • Review Process: Outline how often you’ll review and adjust your marketing plan. 
  • Establish a system for gathering feedback from your team and stakeholders. 

Conclusion 

  • Summarize your B2B marketing plan’s key points and reiterate the importance of its implementation for achieving business success.

What Should a B2B Marketing Plan Put into Consideration? 

In addition to the above elements, here are a few factors that you should include in formulating your marketing plan:  

  • A SWOT Analysis: Conduct a thorough analysis of your business’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to inform your marketing strategy better. 
  • Customer Journey Mapping: Understand the various touchpoints your customers encounter throughout their journey with your brand, helping tailor marketing efforts at each stage. 
  • Competitive Advantage: Clearly define how your products or services offer a competitive edge over others in the market, emphasizing what makes your business stand out. 
  • Lead Generation Strategy : Develop a detailed plan for attracting and capturing qualified leads, outlining strategies such as content marketing, lead magnets, or targeted advertising. 
  • Sales and Marketing Alignment: Foster collaboration between the sales and marketing teams to ensure a seamless transition from lead generation to conversion, aligning strategies for overall business success. 

Key Takeaways

Creating a robust B2B marketing plan requires careful consideration of your target audience, clear goals, and well-defined strategies. By following the tips, studying real-world examples, and planning ahead, you’ll be well-equipped to develop a successful B2B marketing strategy that drives results for your business.

Transform your business growth with Blue Atlas B2B Marketing Services ! Let’s build your effective marketing plan strategy today – Contact us now!

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Blue Atlas Marketing Accessibility Statement

Accessibility Statement

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Screen-reader optimization: we run a background process that learns the website’s components from top to bottom, to ensure ongoing compliance even when updating the website. In this process, we provide screen-readers with meaningful data using the ARIA set of attributes. For example, we provide accurate form labels; descriptions for actionable icons (social media icons, search icons, cart icons, etc.); validation guidance for form inputs; element roles such as buttons, menus, modal dialogues (popups), and others. Additionally, the background process scans all of the website’s images and provides an accurate and meaningful image-object-recognition-based description as an ALT (alternate text) tag for images that are not described. It will also extract texts that are embedded within the image, using an OCR (optical character recognition) technology. To turn on screen-reader adjustments at any time, users need only to press the Alt+1 keyboard combination. Screen-reader users also get automatic announcements to turn the Screen-reader mode on as soon as they enter the website.

These adjustments are compatible with all popular screen readers, including JAWS and NVDA.

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Disability profiles supported in our website

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Last updated on April 1st, 2024

B2B Marketing Strategies: Free Templates, Examples & Definitions

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B2B marketing strategies are a plan that is developed by a business selling to another business looking to drive results by influencing their potential customers. It’s the strategic direction that leads to the tactics that will be implemented in the coming months to achieve objectives that align with the overarching business goals.

Whether you’re the size of Salesforce, or you’re still in the early days trying to win your first 100 customers—the primary goal is still the same: Influence your potential customers.

And in order to win those customers and become profitable (or stay that way), your B2B brand is going to need a marketing strategy.

But where do you even begin to create a B2B marketing strategy?

You’ve come to the right place. In this post we’re going to share a 5-step process, tried and tested templates and some examples that will inspire the approach you take for creating B2B marketing strategy that drives results.

Let’s jump in and discuss:

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B2b marketing strategy process:.

  • Start with customer research
  • Conduct qualitative and quantitative analysis
  • Establish key objectives and metrics
  • Develop your B2B customer journey map
  • Identify executional marketing tactics

B2B Brand Strategies:

  • Transparency
  • Cause & Purpose Association
  • Being The Underdog
  • Employee Empowerment
  • Launch Free Tools
  • Own Your Position Of Strength
  • Being Customer-Focused

B2B Lead Generation Tactics:

  • Downloadable Assets
  • Host Webinars
  • B2B Review Sites
  • Paid Search Advertising
  • Paid Social Advertising

Why you need a B2B marketing strategy

The first question you’re probably asking is this:

Why is a documented and well-researched marketing strategy so important?

Is it really worth taking resources away from executing on marketing tactics and marketing automation to put together this plan—especially when your marketing team is small (or non-existent)?

The answer is:

Absolutely.

And in this post, we’re going to talk about why exactly that is, how you can navigate the process, and share some real-world examples from brands you know (and maybe love).

First, let’s use a simple example to compare B2B to B2C from a marketing standpoint:

For B2B companies, the potential buyer pool is typically smaller and less urgently looking to buy. Everyone needs toilet paper and (almost) everyone wants new shoes, but far fewer people will rush out to buy surface drills, ultrasound machines or a brand new customer support software on a whim.

In other words, if your approach to marketing is “sit back and hope our customers break down the door to throw money at us” — you’re probably going to be waiting for a while.

There’s still power in word of mouth, but many organizations aren’t in a position to let customers find them organically—and typically very slowly.

inbound marketing model

A B2B marketing strategy dictates how an organization will be proactive in attracting customers, closing sales and remaining on the road to continued financial success.

Having a marketing strategy also allows organizations to iterate on their marketing efforts over time. Experimenting to learn what works and what doesn’t for your customer segment can be valuable, but only if you’re able to capture data you can learn from in the future.

Very few companies have gone completely under from a single bad marketing decision. It’s happened, but it typically happens after the cumulation of several bad decisions, and you want to give yourself every advantage to avoid those pitfalls.

So if you’re sold the why of a B2B marketing strategy , keep reading—it’s time for the how .

How to create a B2B marketing strategy:

Alright, so now that we’ve touched on the *why* behind a documented & research-backed strategy—it’s time to talk about *how* you can do it.

(Hint: It starts with a good amount of research)

1. Start with customer research

There’s something that many marketers agree is incredibly important, and yet many companies don’t do it anywhere near as much as they should:

Customer research.

If you don’t know what your customers’ pain points *actually* are beyond just a wild guess, your marketing decisions aren’t going to be based on research and your chances of flopping are much higher.

Don’t be fooled, either—customer research goes beyond anecdotal evidence that your audience is on a specific channel or is purchasing a certain way.

The best marketers don’t just know more about the latest channel, tool or tactic. They know more about… people. You can find plenty of crafty ways to get your message in front of prospects, but if you want those people to actually pay attention—rather than just ignoring you—you better do your research. — Katelyn Bourgoin , Growth Strategist & Trainer

We have a full post that tells you everything you need to know about how to find your target audience . It touches on identifying what your core offering to your customers is & building customer personas .

Here’s the high level view of the 4-step persona process, but the full post is worth a read if you’re still at the persona-building stage.

Marketing Persona

The big takeaway that we’ll repeat here is this:

Actually talk to your customers. And if you don’t have any, talk to the customers of your competition.

“Instead of trying to guess what your customers were thinking, you can actually ask them what they were thinking.” — Josh Gallant, Digital & SEO Strategist with Foundation

Before you start planning your marketing strategy , you need to figure out if you’re on the right track—will your efforts create value, or are you trying to fish with dynamite?

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” — Sun Tzu in The Art of War

But talking to your customers is only the first step in the research process.

It’s not enough to just send a survey, book a few calls, take some notes and call it a day. Your research needs to go deeper than that. And that’s where the qualitative and quantitative analysis comes into play.

2. Conduct qualitative & quantitative analysis

Talked to your customers? Fantastic.

Collecting answers to interview or survey questions from your customers is only the first step.

What you have at this point is data —not insights.

The same goes for having Google Analytics installed on your website (if you don’t, you should). Just because it’s collecting data doesn’t mean you have insights in a bottle.

Next—you need to analyze that data.

  • Look at the customer research you’ve collected.
  • Look at common behaviours and actions that are happening on your website
  • Integrate Google Analytics with your CRM to analyze your most profitable leads
  • If you have a sales team, ask them what questions come up the most
  • If you have active social media pages , look at what people are messaging you
  • If you have a support team, ask them what problems are the most common

And when you’re analyzing this data, remember that you can find insights using two different approaches—qualitative and quantitative.

Qualitative analysis…

Is intentionally open-ended and not necessarily based on numbers. (i.e. asking a customer “What’s one thing that frustrates you the most about ABC product?” to understand what their most common problems are.)

Quantitative analysis…

Relies on questions that can be answered with data, numbers and/or statistics. (i.e. researching which questions are getting the most search volume in Google, and using the findings to prioritize your customers’ most common problems.)

To gain the best possible understanding of the market and your customers, you’ll need both.

Here are two of our favourite methods to put into practice here:

1. Ask your customers what their biggest pain point is.

And leave it as open-ended as you can. If you ask leading questions here (i.e. “Is ABC a major pain point for you?”) you’ll miss out on what their pain points *actually* are.

Ask them the question, let them share whatever they’d like, then compare the responses to look for trends after you’ve conducted a handful of interviews.

2. Use the Sherlock Homeboy Technique to see what’s working best for your competition.

Define what result or metric you want to focus on, then study your competition.

What are they doing marketing-wise that’s achieving that result the best? Don’t be afraid to get specific as well—if they’re creating blog content that’s working, which specific topics are performing the best? Is there a certain *type* of content that’s working best?

The Sherlock Homeboy technique will become your best friend here.

For example: Which HubSpot blog posts are attracting the most backlinks?

sherlock homeboy technique

#SherlockHomeboy 🔍

3. Establish key objectives and metrics

Every organization is chasing success. But what “success” actually looks like varies wildly from one company to the next, and how “success” is measured varies just as much.

The same is true for B2B marketing strategies—a successful strategy could be one that increases sales, or generates awareness, or attracts more leads, or increases customer referrals , and the list can go on & on.

Our walkthrough on how B2B marketers can identify key content marketing metrics and objectives outlines how to approach this from a content marketing lens, but the same thinking can be extrapolated to other marketing strategies.

  • Identify your business goals first—what does success look like?
  • Work backwards from that goal to figure out what actions and results will lead to hitting your business goals & achieving success
  • Connect these actions to metrics you can track that show progress

And you’ll have a (rough) map of which metrics matter most and how exactly they tie into your overall business goals.

Here’s the thing that we see a lot of B2B marketers get hung up on:

All data can be important, but if you try to measure and analyze everything, you’re going to end up with nothing.

Just because you can track and measure 100 different metrics doesn’t mean you should be tracking and measuring all 100. The key is to prioritize the metrics that best align with your business objectives.

Are click-through rates from Twitter posts impacting your business goal of generating more inbound leads? It’s unlikely, but if they are then it’s something you want to track.

How about click-through rates from your blog posts to your demo request landing page? The impact on your business goal here is likely going to be a lot higher, so it’s a metric you’ll want to pay closer attention to.

Not only does this keep you focused on what matters, it prevents you from being overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data points you have at your disposal.

After you identify which metrics have the most impact on your business goals and which you’re planning to actively track—the next step is setting targets and marketing goals.

Here’s the key:

Make sure your goals are SMART.

smart goal framework

Specific : Explain exactly what it’s you’re trying to accomplish.

Measurable : Make sure there’s a way for progress and success to be tracked.

Achievable : It needs to be realistically possible (i.e. “generate 50,000 inbound leads this year” when you only had 200 last year is likely a major stretch)

Relevant : If the goal doesn’t connect to your business goals and won’t directly impact your overall success, it’s not worth setting.

Time-Bound : A goal without a deadline is just a dream.

Let’s say you’ve identified blog post visitors from Google as your highest converting source of traffic and you want to increase the volume here.

Instead of your goal being:

“Get more visitors to our blog”

It would look more like this:

“Since organic blog traffic is our best converting traffic source, I want to increase organic blog traffic from 2,000 sessions to 3,000 sessions per month within 3 months.”

4. Develop your B2B customer journey map

At Foundation, we start every content marketing strategy with a B2B customer journey map .

The customer journey map is an opportunity for you to become familiar with the various touchpoints that are involved in your B2B marketing strategy as customers move through the sales funnel , as well as what influences their decisions and what questions they may have.

This is also a great place to include ideas for content that may answer those questions, how many searches that content might receive based on your research, and what format is best for that content.

This is the template we use at Foundation:

b2b customer journey map

(You can download a copy of your own here)

A nd here’s how you can get started with a journey map:

  • Identify who the key stakeholders are (and who needs to buy in) at each stage of the buying cycle
  • Outline what’s most likely to influence them at each stage
  • Note down the most common questions they’re likely asking (your customer research is going to come in handy here)
  • Use a tool like Ahrefs / Moz / UberSuggest to get a rough estimate of the monthly search volume in Google for the commonly asked questions
  • Brainstorm a few quick ideas for content that could answer these questions (don’t worry about getting too into the weeds with these ideas)
  • Jot down the types of content you’re planning to use at each stage

At its core, the customer journey map helps you understand your different buyer personas and identify opportunities to get their attention.

It’ll also keep your sales team from becoming the annoying sales reps that keep showing up in your inbox with the wrong message at the wrong time.

When you know the specific pains your best customers are experiencing at each stage of their journey, you can reach out with the right message at the right time to help them solve those pains.

5. Identify executional marketing tactics

At this point, you’ll have your customer research, a customer journey map, qualitative & quantitative analysis, and a breakdown of your key metrics and SMART goals.

It’s time to map out what you want to do to reach those goals.

Let’s run with an example… Here’s the details:

  • In Q3/Q4 last year, the case studies on your website had 40 downloads
  • Of those 40 leads, you were able to close 10—a 25% close rate
  • The rest of your downloadable resources only had a 10% close rate, so case studies generated the best results for your business

And here’s the goal you’ve landed on:

“Since our case study leads have the highest close rates, we want to generate 100 total case study downloads by the end of Q2 this year.”

What you need to figure out now is how you’re going to increase the amount of case study downloads this year.

  • What tactics are you going to test?
  • Which distribution channels are you going to experiment with?
  • Are you going to share the case studies directly on these channels?
  • Are you going to use content like blog posts & videos to attract people first?

Before you make any decisions, let’s take a look at the common content marketing funnel:

b2b marketing funnel

You’re trying to bring in strangers and convert them into leads . In order to do that, you first need to turn those strangers into visitors.

Looking at the funnel, we can see that at the top of the funnel, blog posts, SEO, videos, podcasts, and social media are the most effective methods for doing exactly that.

So it would make sense for a few of your marketing tactics to look like this:

  • Publish at least 2 blog posts per month
  • Create 1 short-form video for social media each week
  • Be a guest on at least 1 podcast per month
  • Conduct at least 1 link building outreach campaign per week promoting our new blog posts to improve our rankings in Google

That will help you turn strangers into website visitors.

From there, you want to figure out what you’re going to do to turn website visitors into leads—how are you going to carry them from a blog post or video to your case studies?

Your tactics here may look like this:

  • Include multiple call-to-actions in blog posts to relevant case studies
  • Launch a retargeting campaign on Facebook/LinkedIn to promote our case studies to blog post visitors and video viewers
  • Ask current customers for testimonials & include them on your case study landing pages

Depending on your business and marketing goals, the tactics you outline are going to look slightly different. You may have the most success with TV ads, so your tactics will reflect how you’re going to get more value out of that channel.

Or perhaps your focus is further down the funnel and your goals are to increase your close rates on inbound leads—if that’s the case, your tactics should include ways to improve your email marketing and automations that trigger after a visitor becomes a lead.

Whatever your goals are, make sure your tactics can be directly tied to achieving those goals and alleviating the pain points your customers are feeling throughout their journey.

Developing your B2B brand strategy: Methods & examples from some of the top brands

At this point, you’ll have conducted plenty of research—customer research, industry research, analytics research—to pull out as many valuable insights as you can.

You’ll have set your high-level business goals and connected them to marketing activities and metrics that carry you toward them.

Then used that research and those marketing goals to plan your customer journey map and executional tactics.

You have a plan that’s ready to be implemented.

But before you dive right in, we want to share a handful of examples from the real world. Both from a brand-building and lead generation (further below) standpoint.

Let’s jump in:

1. Transparency

A brand development strategy that more and more companies have been adopting in recent years is transparency.

For Buffer , this has meant making all of their behind-the-scenes data—revenue, workplace diversity metrics, even salaries—freely available to anyone who wants to access them.

Here’s a great example from their CEO, Joel Gascoigne:

buffer announcement

He talked about how they tried to scale too quickly and had to let 10 of their recent hires go. This type of honest communication simply isn’t common in the business world.

What’s more, he outlined the steps the company was taking to right the ship, starting with a salary cut of 40% for himself and then-COO Leo Widrich.

“It’s more work to be transparent, because you’re sharing the data, the numbers, and you’ve got to explain the context. One of the things I love about transparency is it forces us to do that.” —Joel Gascoigne, CEO of Buffer

Here’s what they share directly on their about page :

buffer transparency

Companies are always eager to talk about their successes, but never their failures, even though that’s where the valuable stuff is.

Businesses don’t always talk about the negatives. They’d rather focus in the moment on trying to be successful, assuming there will be time for reflection afterwards.

That strategy may work for some, but the fact is that having transparency as a core value has earned Buffer a ton of attention from the likes of Forbes , The Atlantic , and Fortune .

As a brand development strategy, transparency may be trendy, but open and honest communication with employees and a commitment to providing more opportunities to underrepresented groups will never go out of style.

2. Cause & Purpose Association

Earlier in Slack’s lifetime (before the brand refresh & before the IPO) the company had a storefront on its website called the Slack Shop , which sold items like wooden coasters, shirts, and socks with Slack branding.

slack shop

Corporate swag is cool, but the real value of the storefront was in charitable giving .

Every six months, Slack selected a new charity to support through store proceeds, with a minimum $10,000 donation.

While the Slack Shop is no longer a permanent fixture (it only appears from time to time), it’s an example of cause and purpose association, also known as cause marketing or cause-related marketing .

Put simply, cause and purpose association is tying your business to an issue or a topic that is more important to the world than your bottom line.

One of the most prominent companies to embrace cause and purpose association is the outdoor clothing and gear company Patagonia .

In 2016, they donated the entirety of their Black Friday sales to environmental groups fighting climate change ($10 million, a 300% increase in sales over the previous year).

“It cost us a bunch of money because it was total revenue. But 60 percent of the customers were new buyers. Sixty percent. It was one of the best business things we’ve ever done.” — Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia

While the initiative got the company a bunch of attention, helping to save the environment is in Patagonia’s DNA.

In 1986, Chouinard committed either 1% of sales or 10% of profits (whichever was larger) to environmental activism, and 10 years later the company started to exclusively use organic cotton.

The culture of cause and purpose association has thrived even without Chouinard at the helm.

Fall of 2018, CEO Rose Marcario donated $10 million (Patagonia’s tax cuts) to environmental charities to protest a tax bill.

Patagonia isn’t in the B2B space, but the same principle applies: One of the most surefire brand development strategies is to stand for something.

Advertising great Bill Bernbach once said:

“If you stand for something, you will always find some people for you and some against you. If you stand for nothing, you will find nobody against you, and nobody for you.”

3. Being the Underdog

Everyone loves to root for an underdog, and many brands have positioned themselves as an alternative to something other companies are or aren’t doing.

In their classic book The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing , Al Reis and Jack Trout write about The Law of the Opposite :

“If you want to establish a firm foothold on the second rung of the ladder, study the firm above you. Where is it strong? And how do you turn that strength into a weakness?”

That’s exactly what Salesforce leadership did in the early days:

They picked an enemy to oppose—their biggest rival, Siebel Systems.

Ahead of a major campaign launch, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff hired actors to pose as protesters at a conference for Siebel. The protesters descended on San Francisco’s Moscone Center with the rallying cry “The internet is really neat! Software is obsolete!”

Another group of actors pretended to be a news crew covering the “protesters” (who were advocating for Salesforce’s cloud-based system).

marc benioff tweet

Because the protest was so realistic, Siebel Systems called the police, and it wasn’t long before actual reporters showed up (ultimately earning Salesforce hundreds of new customers).

“This marketing stunt worked across many fronts: we built Salesforce.com morale, got great press coverage, and brought our competitor’s customers to our event to hear our message. Within two weeks, more than 100,000 organizations signed up for our service; most were introduced to it through articles about the launch. Later, our End of Software campaign was recognized by PR Week as the ‘Hi-Tech Campaign of the Year.’” — Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce

Over the years, Benioff has grown fond of these guerrilla marketing tactics—using the actions of competitor companies to put a spotlight on his own brand.

It’s a tactic that Slack also utilized recently, when it put an open letter to Microsoft as a full-page ad in the New York Times the day the software giant’s competitor, Microsoft Teams, was unveiled.

slack newspaper ad

In that letter, Slack spoke about the lessons it had learned in building its platform, noting that communication software has to be more than a list of features.

With one advertisement, Slack positioned itself as both the underdog and the master.

The company couldn’t fight Microsoft in a battle of resources ( see $1.27 trillion with a “T” market cap ), but Slack’s role as the king of communication meant they weren’t afraid to offer some tips for success to the competitor infringing on its turf.

Naturally, some people loved the ad. Some people hated it.

But that’s the goal, right?

Getting people talking.

4. Employee Empowerment

First of all—what does this *actually* mean?

According to study.com (great domain name), employee empowerment means giving employees a certain level of autonomy and responsibility for decision-making regarding their specific organizational tasks.

As Mike Tanner explored in his book Really Little Wins , when given autonomy and the ability to tackle his tasks in whichever order he desired, he experienced a dramatic increase in job satisfaction and productivity.

One of the best examples of employee empowerment as a B2B marketing strategy was the video campaign the live chat company Drift ran on LinkedIn in 2018 —a campaign that was planned only five days before it was launched, yet generated 3 million views and resulted in the highest single-day traffic in the company’s history.

drift linkedin takeover

Dave Gerhardt (Former VP of marketing at Drift) had been running some engagement experiments using LinkedIn video, which was a fairly recent addition to the platform, and found his videos getting thousands of views and a ton of engagement. People he did not know would recognize him as “that guy from the LinkedIn videos.”

Seeing how far his message had spread, he wondered what would happen if a hundred people at Drift posted videos to LinkedIn to promote a new product.

It started with half a dozen people posting videos during their daily commutes, and then things started to get really crazy when one of the product managers posted a video while on vacation:

“She’s literally skiing and … she’s talking about how, you know, ‘Modern email is broken. We built an email marketing platform that actually matches how people want to buy…’ and she’s literally skiing down the mountain. That was when just all hell broke loose, because at that point, then once people saw it, it turned into a competition here internally where everyone started to one up each other.” —Dave Gerhardt, VP of Marketing at Drift

With its super-engaged workforce, Drift is also one of the leaders in employee advocacy.

It’s a strategy where employees share company content to their personal social networks and in turn are able to grow their personal brands.

The company will routinely have employees from different departments create content based on their expertise, such as a customer success manager hosting an informational video about using video in customer success .

5. Launch Free Tools

People tend to love things that help them solve problems.

And they love it even more when that help is free.

Creating helpful tools and releasing them for free is a fantastic way to help your customers solve their problems and build up brand affinity. And one of the best in the industry at doing exactly that is HubSpot.

They’ve created and launched dozens of free tools over the years. The current tally is at 45 different tools available for download—with everything from buyer personas to invoice templates making the cut:

hubspot free tools

But one of their most well-known tools launched in 2007 (the early days)—the Website Grader .

website grader

Visitors type in their email address and the URL of their website, and the Website Grader will measure the site’s marketing effectiveness, generating a score between 0 and 100 based on factors including traffic, SEO and social media. Based on its findings, the grader will also suggest ways to improve inbound marketing efforts.

The user gets actionable insights and suggestions.

HubSpot fills their pipeline with well-populated leads.

HubSpot may be one of the best-known free tool providers, but it’s not the only one.

Over the past few years, Shopify’s also gotten in on the action—creating privacy , refund , and terms of service policy templates for its users (which are bundled with a free trial of the product, of course).

shopify privacy policy

Refrens.com also provides free  online invoice generator  for agencies, small businesses, and freelancers.

Having new stuff to play with online is always cool, but the reason that offering free tools is a great brand development strategy is that it’s all about empowering the customer to do things they wouldn’t be able to on their own.

Consultants to analyze our website are expensive.

So are lawyers that write custom privacy, refund and TOS policies.

If you can give customers the tools to tackle their own problems to a certain standard, they’ll value the experience, gain confidence, and remember that it was YOU that helped them.

And as an added bonus, it’s no surprise that the best free tools are also often the most linked to free tools.

B2B Brands can create a lot of different types of content: How To's, Guides, News, Research, Product Updates, Collections, Round Ups, Stats, Reports, Definitions, etc… But the most *LINKABLE* asset you can create is often times a TOOL. ⚒️What do I mean? (THREAD) — Ross Simmonds (@TheCoolestCool) January 20, 2020

If you can create something that’s helpful for your target users or customers, they’re highly likely to be willing to give you their email address to get access. And the more helpful your tool becomes, the more people will be talking about it.

6. Own Your Position of Strength

Here’s the reality:

There’s little room for humility in marketing.

“Marketing, like war, is a zero-sum game. If you want something you have to take it from someone else. In order for someone to win, someone has to lose. Adam Morgan described it as ‘like a knife-fight in a phone box.’ there isn’t anywhere to hide. There isn’t any place for bystanders. Everyone has to choose.” — Dave Trott, advertising legend

In other words, businesses aren’t often going to succeed by caring deeply about how their competitors might feel.

You need to be willing to own your position of strength. When something great happens to your business, you should use it to your advantage.

This doesn’t mean you need to ship a press release for every single thing that ever happens with your company, but promoting and announcing that your company is top rated SaaS product in your category can affirm your position at the top.

salesforce #1 crm

You won’t be at the top of a product or service category forever, but when you say your business is #1 in your vertical or within a certain customer base, that becomes your reputation with customers and competitors alike.

Find out what your organization is knocking out of the park and promote yourself with it.

If the goal of marketing is to persuade the right sort of customers to buy, then promoting yourself as a leader in a specific area is one of the most surefire ways to do so.

7. Being Customer-Focused

It’s easy for a business to say they’re customer-focused.

But this typically means the great service they provide ends with sales and support.

Companies that are truly customer-focused are investing in long-term relationships with their customers. They treat the amount of money they can make as secondary to the personal growth and development of the customer.

Naturally, this focus on helping their customers win is going to lead to the company winning long-term as well.

Plenty of B2B companies host conferences with the goal of helping to educate and inform. HubSpot hosts Inbound , a conference dedicated to marketing, sales, and business. Slack is behind Frontiers , about the intersection of technology and organizational performance.

One of the best conferences is Twilio’s Signal .

signal event

It’s a two-day customer and developer conference focused on Twilio’s products, one-on-one engagement with experts, networking and building stronger relationships with customers.

Demonstrating their commitment to their developers and customers, Twilio also hires developer evangelists who can teach others about coding and the world of software development to serve as the public face of the company to local groups around the world.

Another business demonstrating their focus on customers in their marketing is customer success company Gainsight .

They’ve created a Slack community for leaders to share their ideas, discuss industry trends, network and learn from guest speakers.

customer success chat

One of the main advantages of being customer-focused is being able to grow a community of people with similar interests. Those relationships may end up being more valuable than the product or service that is being provided.

What’s next?

For those keeping track at home, that’s seven brand building strategies that the top brands in B2B have used over the past decade to position themselves as industry leaders.

Even if you’re not Slack or Salesforce-sized (most of us aren’t), you can still take inspiration from their initiatives and campaigns and test smaller-scale versions.

Now let’s shift gears a bit.

Let’s talk lead generation tactics for B2B brands.

Creating a lead generation strategy: What works & what do you need?

No matter how you tackle the brand building side of B2B marketing, one thing will almost always be true—you need more (or just better) leads.

Chances are your B2B marketing strategy that’s in the works as you read this post is connected to increasing revenue in some fashion. More customers, better retention, higher quality pipeline—all of these goals have one thing in common: Revenue.

And as you’re working backward from that primary business goal, the almost unavoidable step you’ll hit is lead generation. You need to find reliable methods and tactics that you can use to generate leads on a consistent basis.

In this section, we’re going to share 5 proven methods you can start using right away.

1. Downloadable Assets

Pop quiz: What do the people love?

We’ve already talked about this one—the people love getting things for free.

There’s a ton of value in offering downloadable assets on your website, especially when they speak to problems beyond your product or service.

For example, Stripe offers guides and resources on everything from talent recruitment to using machine learning for fraud detection.

Similarly, Intercom offers downloadable ebooks on product management , customer engagement and even the jobs-to-be-done productivity framework.

intercom book

Free stuff is great.

And it’s even better when giving away these free assets that help your audience also result in leads for your business.

In exchange for the free template, guide, worksheet or ebook, your future customers will give you their email address (and whatever else you ask for) with a form.

And just like that, you now have the contact information of someone who’s expressed interest in something you offer. And once you have that information, you can start to reach out (manually or with automated email sequence outreach ).

Offering downloadable assets is one of the most common lead generation strategies —and for good reason. It’s because it works. Plain and simple.

2. Hosting Webinars

The humble webinar has long been a staple of B2B marketing.

It’s a training session, product demo and Q&A all rolled into one live and interactive meeting.

However, companies are starting to recognize that webinars are more than just great tools for interacting with and helping to educate current customers—they can also be used to increase customer lifetime value , reduce churn, convert trial users and, yes, even generate leads.

Intercom in particular frequently hosts webinars that feature a well-known guest or business leader sharing their expertise.

Not only does this attract people outside of the company ecosystem, it also increases product and brand awareness and helps build relationships with these guests.

intercom webinars

You can also include incentives to convince leads to attend. Things like free strategy calls, templates, extended trials, etc.

While Intercom may talk a lot about the features of their platforms, their public-facing webinars are intended to be as valuable as possible, and that’s what will lead people to poke around their websites and sign up for trial accounts.

Notion takes the same approach.

They run weekly webinars on CrowdCast that just explore the hundreds of ways people use Notion. They’re not *selling* Notion on the webinar—the goal is to show how awesome the product can be, introduce plenty of great ways to get value from it and let the rest take care of itself.

notion webinars

Intercom also allows their trial users to attend product-specific webinars. As a result, trial users learn more about what the platform is capable of and how they might use it better, and have added incentive to become paid users.

And that’s the art of the pitch: Demonstrate the value of a product to a user, showcase how it can make their life easier, and they’ll typically be willing to at least give it a try.

3. B2B Review Sites

One of the most significant trends in the B2B world over the past several years has been the Yelpification of B2B .

Our personal behaviours of looking for social proof, reading reviews, and making judgement calls about products or services have slowly but surely spilled over into the business world.

Some of the biggest adopters of this trend are the business software review sites G2, Capterra and TrustRadius, and as a result they’re getting huge amounts of traffic.

Yelpification Of B2B. The same way Yelp / TripAdvisor is make or break for restaurants — Capterra / G2 are becoming that for B2B software. They already rank: #2 for 70+ branded terms. #3 for 60+ branded terms. #4 for 80+ branded terms. AND… #1 for hundreds of BOFU pages. — Ross Simmonds (@TheCoolestCool) June 9, 2019

All of this traffic, combined with the social proof these sites provide, can act as significant lead drivers for B2B software.

When you visit Capterra and see that Notion has an overall rating of 4.5 stars, tons of glowing reviews, and starts at $4 a month, odds are you’re going to click through to Notion’s product page to at least see what all the hype is about.

4. Paid Search Advertising

We touched on this during the customer journey mapping stage.

Your audience has pain points and questions that they’re asking. Where are they going to ask those questions? That would be Google.

Take a look at the current search market share:

google market share

Google = 90.8%

That means 9 out of 10 searches are happening on Google-owned properties.

So if you’re customer has questions, and you have answers—where is it that you need to be? Where they’re asking the questions, of course.

A successful content marketing strategy where SEO is a major part is going to lead to long-term success when executed well, but the other search-related tactic you can start executing right away is Google Ads .

The process is fairly straightforward:

  • Figure out what your audience is searching for the most
  • Setup a landing page that offers a downloadable resource related to their question
  • Build your campaign at ads.google.com and monitor the results as you go

The value of Google Ads is that they will put your company on page 1 for a relevant Google Search. Yet over the last five years, the cost-per-acquisition (CPA) for a Google Ad campaign within most industries has steadily increased. So, many companies use social media ads to build trust and familiarity which can result in a more successful Google Ads campaign . But, Google Ads are definitely something worth testing at the very least.

5. Paid Social Advertising

While paid social ads are similar to Google ads in the sense that you’re paying to reach your audience right away—the stage itself is a bit different.

With Google Ads, your customers are actively looking for something that you offer. You’re just paying to show up at the top of the list.

With social ads, your customers are not actively looking for you. In fact, all they’re looking to do most of the time is figure out what their friends, family, colleagues and favourite celebs are up to.

If you want to just open up Facebook and launch a campaign to target certain interests or demographics, the audience you’re targeting is going to be quite cold. They probably don’t know you, and they’re probably going to be hesitant to give you their information or swipe their credit card right away—if they even stop scrolling and give you the time of day.

So how should you approach social ads?

Retargeting ads.

First, setup a Facebook Pixel and LinkedIn Insights Tag on your website. This will keep track of who’s visiting your site and what actions they’re taking.

Then, as the pixels collect more and more information, you can launch social ad campaigns that target people who’ve already taken specific actions that indicate they might be interested in what you’re offering.

Cold → Warm

You can narrow it down to target only people that visited your pricing page but didn’t convert, added a product to their cart but didn’t checkout , or just visited more than one blog post.

In 2019 we analyzed 100 Facebook ads from SaaS brands to see what tactics, campaigns, and ad types were working the best—be sure to give that post a read as well if you’re planning to launch an ad campaign in the near future.

b2b saas facebook ads

Wrapping Things Up

One of the most exciting things about B2B marketing is that there’s always something new to try or experiment with. And while most tactics don’t last, the rules of brand strategy have proven to be far more consistent.

If you’ve made it this far—congratulations and happy to see you at the finish line!

Hopefully you’ve been able to pull some great value from this post. Don’t forget to hit “bookmark” so you can come back to the examples we shared down the road.

Let’s recap what we just covered.

If you’ve made it this far, you’re not like most marketers…

Most marketers aren’t interested in doing hard things like reading a blog post this long.

But here you are.

You’re demonstrating your willingness to do hard things, so how about one more:

We challenge you to take one of the ideas you’ve read about and act on them. Right now. Not tomorrow. Right now. Copy the section and send it to your boss or team and say “we need to think about how we can apply this.”

That’s all it takes.

And with that, we’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments down below. Strategy steps that you’re getting hung up on? Favourite brand building examples? Favourite lead generation tactics? Let’s hear ‘em. 🚀

(Post written with contributions from Matthew Rawle )

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The Ultimate Guide to B2B Marketing Strategies

August 12, 2021 - 10 min read

Kat Boogaard

Did you know that 64% of B2B companies surveyed across industries have a formal marketing plan ? Gone are the days of crossing your fingers and hoping your product or service sells itself. To stay competitive with the rest of the market, you need to have a B2B marketing plan in place to increase and convert as many leads as possible.

We know that creating a marketing strategy and mapping out your plan can be challenging and complex. There are so many tactics to use, channels to get up and running, and ways to approach your marketing strategy when speaking to various audiences. Not to mention that, in today’s world, digital marketing is paired with offline marketing efforts, which adds more layers of complexity to your overarching strategy.

That’s why we’ve broken down everything you need to know about B2B marketing, including how to organize your B2B marketing plan, top strategies to consider weaving into your plan, and how Wrike can help you execute your B2B marketing strategy with more organization and less stress. 

First, let’s start with the basics and define what B2B marketing is.

What is B2B marketing?

B2B marketing, or business-to-business marketing, refers to the marketing of products and services from one business to another. 

In B2B marketing, the buyer is a business, or more specifically, the decision-makers who have purchasing power within that business. For example, companies who create software products like team-wide communication tools or accounting systems market their product to other companies. Wholesalers also engage in B2B sales. They purchase products from one business in bulk and sell them to their consumers, like store owners. 

B2B marketing targets the needs of an entire organization and not consumers at an individual level. Simply put, the organization becomes the customer, which means the marketing strategies need to be tailored to that specific audience. Businesses might be looking for ways to help their teams become more efficient, tools to make their work easier and more manageable, or industry-specific products and services their teams simply can’t live without. 

How to organize a B2B marketing plan

You can organize a B2B marketing plan in many ways, depending on your goals and what you want to achieve. 

Understanding the B2B marketing funnel is one way to create a clear and solid B2B marketing plan. The B2B marketing funnel maps the buyer’s journey from prospect to customer, using various channels and messaging along the way until the prospect converts. You can organize each function of the B2B strategy within each stage of the funnel to ensure you’re hitting every step. 

The typical B2B marketing funnel can vary, but we’re focusing on the following six-stage model:

  • Awareness: At the first, widest stage of the funnel, you’re trying to pull in potential customers by bringing awareness to your products, services, and solutions offered. Within this stage, you should include all activities that enable you to reach prospects. This might consist of paid advertising, social media, and search engine rankings.
  • Interest: At this stage of the funnel, your primary focus is to increase interest among the audience that you attracted in the awareness stage. Prospects may learn more about your business and offerings through your website. This stage creates an opportunity for your business to develop a relationship with prospective leads and start building a sense of trust.
  • Consideration: You’re now working with prospective customers who may end up purchasing your product. Activities that fall under this stage should include utilizing email marketing to provide more information about your products and offers. Targeted content is crucial, and you can nurture the relationship with free trials, resources like guides and case studies, and more.
  • Intent: If the prospect reaches this stage, they have demonstrated that they’re interested in purchasing the product or service. This provides an opportunity to prove why your product or service is the best one on the market. Convince the prospect that they’re making the best choice to give them that extra bump to complete a purchase.
  • Evaluation: At this stage of the funnel, your prospective buyer is making a final decision about whether or not they want to purchase from you. This is the last chance to hook the prospect, and sales and legal often jump in to help close out the experience.
  • Purchase: The transaction is complete! You’ve signed a new customer.

With these funnel stages as a framework to organize your marketing plan, you can then set clear goals you want to achieve, determine what resources you have, and identify the marketing channels you’re going to focus on. 

For example, awareness and interest are often cited as the key components needed for lead generation. So if you’re looking to bring in more leads, you’ll likely want to focus on these two stages of the funnel and identify which channels you’ll start with to support them. 

Speaking of channels to focus on, let’s take a look at the top B2B digital marketing strategies you should consider that fall within various stages of the funnel. 

Top B2B digital marketing strategies

B2B marketing happens both offline and online. In our increasingly connected world, digital marketing strategies are crucial when it comes to supporting your overall marketing plan.

Fortunately, there’s no shortage of B2B digital marketing strategies to choose from to complement your offline efforts. Here are the top B2B digital marketing strategies we see companies lean into: 

  • Develop a company website: A company website might seem like a no-brainer, but did you know that over 80% of buyers visit a company’s website before making a purchase? Your website is an entry point for prospective buyers to learn more about your business, what you have to offer, and how to get in touch with you to complete a purchase. Your digital presence is a simple and easy way for prospective clients to share your business with the key decision-makers within their organization too.
  • Expand your digital presence through search engine optimization (SEO): According to Hubspot’s 2020 Marketing Mix Report , 36% of sales and marketing leads result from SEO efforts. Your business needs to be discoverable. The internet is filled with websites and companies offering similar services, so it’s necessary to utilize SEO tactics that will help your website rank near the top of search results.
  • Harness the power of social media: How many times do you check social media throughout the day? How many social media channels do you engage with regularly? If your answer is “a lot” to both of those questions, you aren’t alone. Social media isn’t just a time suck — it’s a purchasing tool. Over 80% of C-level and VP-level B2B buyers use social media to influence their purchase decisions. Even though it might seem like social media is the place to target individual consumers, you should know that businesses are utilizing this channel too. And if you aren’t sure where to start with your B2B social media strategy, LinkedIn is the most used and trusted channel , reporting an 86% usage amongst B2B professionals.
  • Give pay-per-click (PPC) advertising a go: It’s not enough to get in front of your current audience — you’ll want to get in front of new audiences too. PPC campaigns are paid campaigns where advertisers only pay when people interact with their ads through impressions or clicks. In the 2020 B2B Content Marketing report , 61% of B2B marketers used pay-per-click advertising in the previous 12 months, making it one of the top three choices for paid distribution channels.
  • Commit to email marketing: When executed correctly, email marketing has an unbeatable return on investment (ROI). One 2019 report suggests that the ROI for email is $42 per dollar spent. And if that’s not convincing enough, Content Marketing Institute reported that email is one of the top three free content distribution channels B2B marketers use.

These are just a few of the B2B digital marketing strategies you should consider building into your larger strategy. The specific choices you make will depend on the number of resources you have to allocate, your digital maturity framework, and the priorities of your business.

In addition to the strategies mentioned above, let’s talk about some more specific (and popular) strategies. We’re breaking down B2B influencer marketing, B2B content marketing, and a B2B marketing mix, as well as how you could build these efforts into your strategy. 

What is B2B influencer marketing?

Influencer marketing is all about promoting your business and products or services by collaborating with influencers. Influencers build a level of trust and connection with their audience members, which makes consumers open to the idea of making purchases based on their recommendations. 

Simply put, B2B influencer marketing leans on well-known people with large followings to share marketing and brand messages with a broader market. Brands generally pay influencers to promote their products to their followers and encourage them to take action and purchase the product for themselves. 

In a survey of 300 B2B marketers, 96% of the ones who engage influencers feel that their influencer marketing program is successful, so it’s worth considering adding some level of influencer marketing to your strategy. 

What is B2B content marketing?

Content marketing plays a significant role in B2B marketing. In fact, 59% of marketers believe that blogs are the most valuable marketing channel.

B2B content marketing isn’t merely about generating content or posting on a blog — it’s about creating content that’s valuable, relevant, consistent, and inspires action. You can use B2B content marketing to expand your audience, emphasize your brand, and drive leads to your business. Forget the days of pumping out content for the sake of publishing and focus on creating content that’s useful and actionable for readers. 

With B2B marketing, it’s essential to understand who your ideal audience is. You also need to know what type of information your audience needs and how you plan to promote your content and get it in front of your audience. 

What is a B2B marketing mix?

The origin of the marketing mix dates is attributed to Jerome McCarthy’s introduction of the 4 P’s in the 1960s. We’ve seen the original 4 P’s expanded and modified in a few different ways throughout the years, but the 4 P’s still hold to be most prevalent when thinking about a marketing mix.

The B2B marketing mix allows you to create a unique selling proposition (USP) and determine how best you fit into the market. B2B marketing mix is sometimes thought of synonymously with the 4 Ps: 

  • Product: Goods or services
  • Price: The amount the consumer pays
  • Place: Where the marketing of the product occurs
  • Promotion: Level of advertising involved

The 4Ps don’t have to be defined in any particular order but should be defined in relation to one another as part of a holistic strategy. These elements, or pillars, should be defined to help you maximize the impact you have and satisfy your customers and your business. With the 4 P’s, you’ll be able to lay out a more effective B2B marketing strategy. 

Why use Wrike to create business to business marketing strategies 

As you can see, a lot of work and information goes into building and executing effective B2B marketing strategies, and Wrike has all of the features you need to manage this process with ease. With Wrike, you’ll be able to:

  • Take advantage of instant insights and optimize your ROI with real-time data 
  • Plan and manage your marketing campaigns in one place
  • Use our campaign management template to manage campaigns from start to finish
  • Adopt a marketing campaign calendar and ditch spreadsheets 
  • Create centralized, steady streams of content with our editorial calendar template
  • Streamline your team’s collaboration and communication so they can focus on executing the strategy

Are you ready to elevate your B2B strategy and start seeing a huge ROI? Sign up for a free trial of Wrike today to help you get started.

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Kat Boogaard

Kat is a Midwest-based contributing writer. She covers topics related to careers, self-development, and the freelance life. She is also a columnist for Inc., writes for The Muse, is Career Editor for The Everygirl, and a contributor all over the web.

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The Definitive Guide to Multi-Channel Marketing

The Definitive Guide to Multi-Channel Marketing

Multi-channel marketing is a complex yet powerful strategy that marketers use to reach more leads using various platforms. By implementing multi-channel marketing, you can reach out to your customers at every stage of their journey. It also allows marketers to study behavioral patterns, making sending targeted messages relevant to their interests easier. Keep reading to discover what multi-channel marketing is and how to make the most of it with the right tools. What is multi-channel marketing? Multi-channel marketing is often defined as the strategy of communicating with prospects and customers across various channels. Instead of running a single campaign or tactic, marketers are now mirroring how consumers operate in various places all at once. It enables leads to take action in response to your offer or service without requiring them to purchase it using one particular channel. There are many types of channels that a business can use to reach potential customers. The most popular ones are: Social media Digital marketplaces Paid and native advertising Content creation Podcasting Blogging Direct mail marketing Mobile marketing Voice assisted search However, not all channels are created equal. The platforms you start with will largely depend on your industry, your audience, and your team’s workload capacity. For example, a B2B software startup may need to focus on building an engaged audience on LinkedIn before expanding to additional channels to build long-term success. With so many marketing channels to choose from, it's no wonder that many companies still struggle to create multi-channel campaigns that can stand out from the crowd. Yet, as the number of marketing channels continues to expand, it becomes more important to develop multi-channel marketing campaigns that can reach all of your potential customers. With multiple channels in play, it's also important to measure the effectiveness of each one. Through closed-loop analytics, marketers will be able to identify which channels were most effective and which ones were not. Why is it important to your business? Multi-channel marketing is important for the simple reason that customers are everywhere. Today's world is full of more channels than ever before, and the need to embrace multi-channel marketing is becoming a critical one. With the rise of digital marketing, customers have more control over their buying decisions. And for many, they’d prefer to consult multiple channels before coming to a conclusion. So it’s easy to see why having the ability to customize how people interact with your business is very helpful for increasing conversions. Another reason why it’s so important to participate in multi-channel marketing is that many consumers expect it these days. Think of it as an opportunity for your brand to stay consistent across various mediums, which helps keep it fresh and relevant. What are the benefits of multi-channel marketing? 1. Access valuable data By implementing multi-channel marketing, you'll be able to reach out to your customers at every stage of their journey. And by analyzing their behavioral patterns, you can send targeted messages that are relevant to their interests. 2. Improve campaign effectiveness Through multi-channel marketing, companies can create an integrated approach that combines various communication channels to reach their customers. This strategy allows them to measure and respond to each other in real-time. Plus, by creating a multi-channel marketing platform that enables marketers to connect and execute cross-channel campaigns, you can improve the effectiveness and efficiency of your marketing efforts while also reducing costs. For example, having more touchpoints in your funnel helps you collect more data. After all, knowing your audience can help determine the best way to reach them. 3. Develop strong ecosystems A good multi-channel marketing ecosystem ties all of your customer touchpoints into one overall experience. You're able to measure and react to each customer's behavior across all of your marketing channels so that your messages are always aligned with theirs. 4. Track wins accurately It can also help you measure your success and identify areas where your promotions are performing well. With that information, you’ll be able to perform A/B testing with the same message on a variety of channels. Or send different messages per platform once you drill down on who uses which channel for what. 5. Engage audiences more A multi-channel marketing campaign can help drive engagement and enhance a customer's experience at all touchpoints. For example, if a customer visits a shoe store, she might receive a discount code after choosing to receive a personalized message from the store. After choosing to receive a welcome email, she'll also be prompted to download the brand app. 6. Understand customers better A successful multi-channel marketing campaign is one that will help you understand your customer's communication and brand preferences so that you can constantly deliver relevant offers across all of them. After they've completed the onboarding process, you'll start providing targeted promotions based on their interests. For instance, if a user has saved their interests for future purchases, you can offer them limited-time discounts or promote products that match their saved interests. When your customers engage with your brand through various methods, you can use their behavioral insights to deliver highly personalized marketing messages. These insights can be used to inform content that's relevant to their interests. Multi-channel marketing examples Not sure where to begin? The simplest approach that many successful companies take is to add a complementary channel to an already established campaign. Here are some multi-channel marketing examples that illustrate this idea: Google Ads are used to promote various products and services. These extensions allow advertisers to easily integrate mobile and web activity into their ad campaigns. Some mail-order catalogs feature URLs or QR codes that direct viewers to a website. This feature is popular because it lets users order online without manually navigating to the online portion of the brand. Many television shows take advantage of the second screen effect by featuring a Twitter hashtag overlay during their shows. Some also verbally encourage their audience to participate on Twitter by following, retweeting, and using the hashtag while watching. Ways to improve your multi-channel communications Despite the advantages of multi-channel marketing, this approach does come with its own unique challenges. First, multi-channel marketing can be very costly. Second, it can take a while to develop a strategy and implement it. Third, it can also be difficult to measure the success of a campaign. With these common issues in mind, here are some simple yet effective ways to improve your existing campaigns: Be consistent. One of the most powerful factors that drive a successful customer experience is consistency. If your customers have varying experiences across all channels, then you run the risk of alienating them. Stay focused. Creating highly choreographed campaigns that are designed to influence multiple channels and devices is not realistic. Instead, marketers should constantly develop and coordinate campaigns that are designed to deliver consistent experiences across all platforms. Simplify everything. Creating targeted messaging that is both accurate and memorable is key to keeping your customers engaged. If you don’t already have one clear idea in all of your content, it’s time to reorganize your calendar. Research more. A clearly defined buyer persona helps marketers identify their ideal buyer and formulate their marketing efforts. Having a clear view of the customer is also critical to understand their behavior. It can help you identify areas where you can improve and develop new strategies to engage more effectively with them. Grow together. Your customer view must evolve along with their experiences. Doing so means constantly updating and revamping your data models and systems. Also, stay on top of marketing trends for each channel. Recognize your limits. Success doesn't come by being present on all of these channels. It comes by addressing the various areas of multi-channel marketing that are necessary to be successful. Use retargeting. Retargeting is a form of advertising that shows targeted ads to people who have bounced from your website while on other platforms. By understanding how many times website users have visited your pages and clicked on your ad, you can then customize your messages and offer them more relevant offers. Include activities. An activation sequence is initiated when a customer makes a purchase or opts in to a marketing offer across various platforms. This step typically begins by sending an email to confirm their account information. How does multi-channel marketing compare with omnichannel? Omnichannel and multi-channel marketing have one big thing in common. They both require you to know which of your channels are most likely to work for your buyer persona and your goals. Other than that, they are quite different. Unlike with omnichannel marketing, cross-channel marketing is the key to successful multi-channel marketing. It involves creating a strategy that works seamlessly across various channels and platforms. Cross-channel communications are also a great way to promote loyalty programs. You can reach out to your users through email and SMS and then provide them with in-app and web push notifications. A unique multi-channel marketing strategy helps you get a clear view of the buying cycle and identify opportunities to improve it. It also allows you to customize messaging and communications to reach each individual customer. For example, SMS marketing and push notifications have become popular channels for personalized engagement. This also means that channel combinations are as important as individual channel strategies since some channels work better with each other than others. For example, TikTok videos are easy to share on Instagram and vice versa. Multi-channel marketing is also reliant on your team’s bandwidth and skillsets. You probably have team members who are experts in different channels. It's possible to end up with a disjointed approach where each team member has their own channel expertise. That’s where a well-rounded marketing team with niche experts for every channel comes in. Omnichannel marketing’s biggest limitation is reach. There are different demographics of people who interact with each channel type. This means that a singular channel approach may not lead you to the right leads in the right way. Additionally, even if the channel is something everyone is familiar with, such as email, there will be differences in the ways each demographic uses the platform. And although messaging should be consistent across all channels, you'll also have to be strategic about what works on each platform. How can I improve my multi-channel engagement? If you want to improve your multi-channel engagement, you have to master the art of the follow-up. Whether it’s ad retargeting, email, or another channel, your channels should all work together to achieve seven or more touchpoints with each lead. Make sure to always offer value when you communicate with a warm lead. That value could be a free trial, helpful content, or anything else that will support your target audience. Also, track the data from your follow-ups the same way you track your initial interactions. Learn from and tweak your strategy over time to find the right combinations of messages and channels that will create a magnetic buyer's journey. What are the challenges of multi-channel campaigns? Content creation for one channel is hard enough. But creating content for multiple channels in a way that ensures they’re all working together cohesively? Even tougher. Still, having a clear goal and roadmap for how you’ll use each channel will make decision-making that much faster. Also, never be afraid to recycle content across platforms. Sometimes people need a few different mediums to learn something new. What are the different types of marketing mediums? Marketing mediums include online and offline channels. Popular online channels include social media, email, paid advertising, SEO, and mobile marketing. Offline channels typically use the mediums of print, television, mail, and radio. How to plan your multi-channel marketing strategy with Wrike A good multi-channel marketing automation system is essential to track all of your leads' interactions and engagement. It can also help you make better decisions and take action on your leads' unique paths. That’s where Wrike comes in. Wrike is a marketing project management software that allows marketers to plan, execute, and analyze multi-channel marketing campaigns. Simply create a new project for your strategy plus additional projects for each deliverable so that every deliverable has a beginning and end that are easy to track. To create unique structures for your many channels and subprojects, add tasks for each step in the process. For example, you can designate content drafting, design elements, and publication as separate tasks by channel. Each task can include approvals from other team members and automatically notify whoever is responsible for the next task once this step is complete. After that, add milestones for the deliverable share or publication date. This will create a deliverable calendar you can share with stakeholders to summarize all current and future initiatives. You can also use Wrike as a centralized marketing data hub with supplementary document and asset storage. Not only does creating a centralized marketing data hub get that single customer view, but it also consolidates all the customer data in one place. You can also use Wrike to create an integration strategy. An integration strategy involves seamlessly weaving various platforms and methods to enable organizations to manage all of their customer communication activities across various channels. This strategy could: include a unified inbox to track all of your customer communication a marketing operations platform that helps you manage all of your publishing and analytics activities a CRM that tracks interactions and engagement Choosing the right multi-channel marketing tool is challenging when you need to manage more than one platform at a time. Wrike helps marketers create fluid and foolproof roadmaps with the help of advanced features perfectly suited for simplifying even the most complex projects. Start your free trial today.

Email Marketing KPIs & Metrics You Need to Know

Email Marketing KPIs & Metrics You Need to Know

A marketing strategy is incomplete without email marketing KPIs to monitor performance. Here are the email marketing metrics to track for campaign success.

How Wrike's Content Marketing Team Manages Projects in Wrike

How Wrike's Content Marketing Team Manages Projects in Wrike

Here at Wrike we eat our own dog food—or drink our own champagne, as we like to say—so we were able to quickly adapt our workflow to meet our evolving needs and increase our momentum. Let’s dig into how we manage content projects in Wrike!

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B2B Marketing Strategies

b2b business plan examples

Marketing a B2B business is a complicated job — and, with it, comes a whole new set of challenges .

Today, the B2B buying process has almost completely gone digital with two-thirds of buyers saying they prefer remote and self-service interactions over in-person ones. As a result, marketers have to cut through the noise of an overcrowded market, figure out innovative ways to drive better leads at lower costs, and craft a memorable online experience.

With so much at stake and so many approaches to choose from, it can be hard to know where to start. But with the right B2B marketing strategies in place, you will be able to easily generate high-quality leads, convert them into customers, and see those customers turn into revenue.

To help set you up for marketing success, we’ve hand-selected the very best B2B marketing strategies that top companies are using today, along with a bunch of examples that will help kickstart your next campaign.

Let’s get started ⚡️

What Is B2B Marketing?

B2B marketing refers to the actions that businesses take to attract, engage, and sell to other businesses. B2B target audiences are people who either own or are employed at a business, and they are typically split up according to company size, industry, revenue, personas, and other business-centric data.

Unlike B2C marketing which targets individual consumers, B2B marketing targets businesses and organizations. As such, B2B sales take longer and involve more decision-makers which means it’s important you use the right strategies to reach your target audience — without wasting time and resources on the people that will never buy from you.

Today, the best B2B marketers use buyer interest and intent data in the same way that B2C companies do — but they combine it with classic B2B lead qualification criteria to ensure they are targeting the most relevant audiences.

12 B2B Marketing Strategies to Start Investing in Today

Of course, one strategy isn’t going to seal the deal. To successfully market your solution, you will need to have multiple strategies in place. The best B2B marketing strategies work together to target ideal buyers, connect leads to sales ASAP, and improve customer lifetime value.

1. Go-to-Market (GTM) Alignment

Did you know that, according to Forrester , highly-aligned companies grow 19% faster and are 15% more profitable than non-aligned companies?

It’s true. Misalignment between your teams negatively impacts your business and your bottom line. And this is especially true when your go-to-market (GTM) team is out of sync.

Your GTM team is responsible for engaging and selling to target buyers as well as establishing a competitive advantage — which means that their work directly translates into revenue. While team structures differ at every organization, GTM teams typically consist of sales, marketing, product, and customer success.

With so many players involved, it’s easy to see how misalignment can occur. But without proper alignment, you are more likely to drive lackluster leads, end up having to deal with disorganized processes, and fail to meet your revenue goals.

Excellent GTM alignment requires a clear GTM team structure focused around a shared goal, ongoing collaboration on strategies, and transparency into shared processes and systems.

Want more advice on getting everyone aligned? Check out our ebook, 5 Ways to Solve the Trillion-Dollar Marketing & Sales Feud.

2. Account-Based Marketing (ABM)

For decades, sales teams have refined their selling by building lists of target accounts and then working to turn those accounts into leads through personalized sales prospecting — via cold calls, emails, and LinkedIn.

Similarly, account-based marketing (ABM) is all about reaching a specific set of target accounts — but through marketing.

ABM is not just one strategy. It relies on a variety of channels and tactics to deliver a hyper-personalized experience to target accounts. These tactics include pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, VIP events, tailored content, personalized direct mail and gifts, custom website experiences, and tons more.

At Drift, we go all in for our ABM accounts and we use all of our favorite channels to engage and interact with them. Meanwhile, for inbound accounts and lower-priority target accounts, we stick to using just a few channels.

ABM offers chart

One thing to keep in mind is that, to get a great ABM campaign off the ground, you need proper GTM alignment because marketing will need to collaborate with sales to decide which accounts to target and what strategies to use to nurture those accounts before passing them onto sales.

Art of ABM CTA v2

3. Conversational Marketing

By 2025, 80% of B2B buying will take place across digital channels. That means now is the best time to invest in new ways to engage buyers digitally.

Conversational Marketing leverages real-time conversations using channels like chatbots and live chat to create an experience that caters to buyers who are live on your website. For example, this chatbot on Gong’s website greets all site visitors with a cheeky hook, inviting them to start a conversation 👇

Conversational Marketing streamlines the buying process by allowing you to respond to questions quickly, assist buyers at every stage of the buying process, and connect qualified leads with sales — by either routing in a sales rep immediately or booking a meeting .

Want to learn more about how Conversational Marketing can help you create a digital experience that your buyers and customers will love? Check out The Conversational Marketing Blueprint .

4. Content Marketing

In 2021, we found that marketing leaders considered content marketing software to be the most critical for generating pipeline . And in 2022, according to Content Marketing Institute, 71% of marketers believe content marketing has become more important for their organization in the past year.

MarTech for Pipeline Generation

Now more than ever, marketing leaders are aware that content marketing is crucial to helping their teams succeed — and that’s hardly a surprise.

Excellent content has the power to capture and hold people’s attention which means you’ll get better results, be it click-through rates, conversations held, or attendance numbers. On the other hand, without great content to back up your other offers like ABM campaigns, digital ads, or events, you will struggle to bring in the number of leads you expect.

To ensure your content is relevant and informative, make sure to listen to your customers to find out what their needs, challenges, and goals are and source ideas from customer-facing teams like sales and customer success. This way, you know your content will lead to engagement.

5. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

68% of online experiences begin with a search engine. Search engine optimization (SEO) refers to all the work that marketers do to make sure their web pages show up on the first page for keywords relevant to their business.

This is a huge area of focus for marketers because SEO leads often close at a higher rate than outbound leads. This is due to the fact that SEO leads are actively looking for a solution to their problems and are typically towards the middle or end of their buying process.

There are two main ways to optimize your web pages. The first is to create long-form content with the goal of ranking for key phrases that top-of-the-funnel and middle-of-the-funnel leads search for. The second is to craft conversion-optimized landing pages that target high-intent keywords and competitor comparison keywords.

Keep in mind though that, while search rankings are important, ultimately your content and web pages should help educate and capture your audience — so make sure your copy is as engaging as it is optimized.

6. Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising

If you’ve ever seen an ad at the top of your search results, then you’ve encountered a pay-per click (PPC) ad. PPC advertising is an advertising model where you pay for every click your ad receives. These ads can be shown in search results, social media feeds, and digital publications via display networks or direct placement.

Succeeding with PPC ads is all about knowing your numbers. By optimizing your ad creatives, landing pages, and nurture sequences, you can achieve a cost-per-acquisition rate that is profitable for your business.

Measuring Conversions Across the Funnel Diagram

However, not all campaigns have to be measured by acquisitions and profit. So long as you set a reasonable budget and actively monitor your campaign, you can also invest in PPC ads to raise brand awareness without expecting an immediate return on investment (ROI).

Check out our guide to B2B digital advertising for a more in-depth strategy.

7. Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is the perfect way to reach your target audience without paying for advertising.

While there’s a lot of opportunity in social media, it can be hard for B2B brands to establish a brand presence. Most people use social media to connect with friends and laugh at memes so boring and stuffy B2B content gets little to no engagement, visibility, or results.

Fortunately, there are a lot of active B2B audiences on Twitter and LinkedIn . 71% of B2B companies use Twitter to distribute their content and 93% use LinkedIn.

Even in these professional arenas, adding a human or emotional element to your content can go a long way.

Just take this post from Shopify which taps into the passion and entrepreneurial spirit of their ecommerce audience. By posting social media content like this, you’ll see far more likes, retweets, and comments than you would expect with your run-of-the-mill B2B content.

Shopify tweet image

8. Employee Advocacy

It’s a fact that people want to connect with other people — and your buyers are no exception.

Employee advocacy allows B2B companies to create a space where buyers and businesses can connect on a human level. By posting company news, updates, and behind-the-scenes content, employees can massively increase brand awareness which often yields higher visibility and engagement than the company’s official account.

The more employees who are active on the platforms that target customers use, the better. With the right platforms, you increase the likelihood of a future customer consuming content that paints your company in a positive light.

On LinkedIn, job titles are always visible under a poster’s name, so every post that gets good engagement brings even more brand awareness, like this one from Dana Feldman at Gong .

Dana Feldman Gong LinkedIn post

9. Live, Virtual, & Hybrid Events

From webinars to large conferences, events have always been a mainstay of B2B marketing even when the pandemic made live events impossible.

Because B2B companies generally sell to specific businesses or people in unique roles, B2B audiences are typically smaller than B2C ones. When it comes to events, that works to your advantage: It means you have the chance to gather and connect with a large number of people in your target audience at the same time.

Your event strategy will largely depend on the audience that you want to reach. For example, you can host large events to attract a bunch of new leads or you can host a more intimate event to interact with your top target accounts. You also don’t have to spend tons of time and resources planning your own event. Instead, you can:

  • Speak at B2B events hosted by companies relevant to yours
  • Sponsor B2B events
  • Attend B2B events and network with other attendees

10. Affiliate Programs

Marketing doesn’t have to be a solo job. With affiliate programs, you can offer a commission to influencers and digital publishers to help you acquire a customer (either rewarding them per sale or per lead).

Not only is affiliate marketing a worthwhile revenue source (as it accounts for 15% of all revenue generated online ), but it’s also an excellent channel for brand awareness. This is because you’ll have hundreds or even thousands of affiliates selling your solution for you with your brand appearing in their newsletters, blog posts, and social media content.

Of course, affiliate marketing also comes with brand risk. So if you go this route, you’ll need to have an affiliate program manager to enforce clear-cut guidelines for advertising your brand.

Also keep in mind that larger companies have more complicated sales cycles where purchasing decisions will be impacted by the needs and opinions of several different people. So, if medium to large-sized companies make up your target audience, partnerships may be a better option than affiliate programs.

11. AI-Powered Lead Nurturing & CRM Automation

Customer relationship management software (CRM) and marketing automation are considered among the most mission-critical systems for generating pipeline . And it’s not hard to see why: both enable businesses to deliver better and more efficient service to buyers .

CRMs essentially act as a single source of truth about the customer. Marketers can use CRMs to target the right leads and nurture them with content relevant to their interests and activity. This helps marketers make the most of their creative assets and resources, as well as their campaign roadmaps.

Customer Journey Campaign Planning

CRMs can also help marketers figure out when and how to approach existing customers with product updates and launch announcements.

AI further speeds up these processes by automating tasks and providing data for marketers to leverage in their campaigns. Today, the top three outcomes that B2B companies saw with their marketing AI were:

  • Creating personalized consumer experiences at scale
  • Accelerating revenue growth
  • Getting more actionable insights from marketing data

Together, CRMs and marketing AI not only provide a reliable source of customer data but they also help drive buyers further down the funnel by providing personalized and relevant customer experiences.

12. Post-Sale Marketing and Customer Expansion

While we’ve spent a lot of time talking about buyers and leads, let’s not forget the people who have already bought in: your customers.

The success rate for selling to an existing customer is 60-70% , far higher than the 5-20% rate for new prospects. This is exactly why many B2B businesses use a “land and expand” model. It’s much easier to sell one service or a handful of software seats and then build on top of that.

But don’t get us wrong — marketing to existing customers isn’t a simple task. This is another strategy where GTM alignment is crucial. Here, marketing, sales, and customer success teams all need to work together to successfully drive customer expansion.

Generally, marketers can take a broad approach by sending out announcements, advertising new offers, and offering trainings to help customers further understand what they can do with their solution. Meanwhile, account executives and customer success managers can take a more one-on-one approach with customers encourage expansion.

7 Effective B2B Marketing Examples

We’ve talked strategy. Now, here are seven great examples of B2B marketing strategies in action.

1. Qualtrics’ ABM

Qualtrics is a global leader in experience management, empowering organizations of all sizes to capture customer, employee, and market insights. With so many potential customers visiting their website, the Qualtrics team wanted to make sure that their website was tailored to all visitors — especially target accounts.

The solution? Qualtrics implemented Drift and used it to uplevel their account-based marketing (ABM) strategy by building out intent-based audiences in 6Sense and leveraging that data to create targeted Drift playbooks.

But the Qualtrics team didn’t stop there. They also made sure that their messaging reflects where the buyer is in their journey. By keeping track of the buyer’s position in the sales funnel, they are able to personalize their experiences and meet visitors exactly where they are, providing them with the most relevant content and the best user experience possible.

2. Lucidchart’s SEO

According to Ahrefs, Lucidchart — a company that offers a collaborative workspace for diagramming and visualizing data — ranks for over 356,000 keyphrases.

For 28,000 of these, they hold positions on the first page of Google. Some of their most high-intent rankings include terms like “flow chart creator,” “process mapping,” and “use case diagram” — all keywords that are highly relevant to their business.

While that is impressive on its own, what truly makes Lucidchart’s SEO strategy stand out is that their marketing team is not only great at driving traffic but at converting it too.

One way that Lucidchart streamlines their web pages for conversion is that they divide up their blog posts by category — and each category features a relevant and specific CTA in order to drive visitors further down the funnel. For example, a blog post about templates will have a CTA in the sidebar encouraging the reader to try out all their templates 👇

Lucidchart blog and sidebar CTA example

3. Teachable’s Affiliate Program

B2B companies that target small business owners can win big with affiliate programs. That’s because small business owners look up to business coaches and influencers to learn how to run and grow their own businesses.

Teachable , an online course-building platform, has harnessed this phenomenon well. Their affiliate program offers up to a 30% commission paid recurringly for as long as the customer continues their subscription.

As a result, bloggers, YouTubers, email marketers, business coaches, and other affiliates recommend Teachable to online entrepreneurs who want to create their own courses. And this translates into revenue for both the affiliate and the company.

Teachable review on DDIO screenshot

4. Testlio’s Employee Advocacy

To win with employee advocacy, you don’t always need an army. Sometimes, you just need one very committed star.

Kristel Kruustuk , the founder of Testlio , is a great example of this. Although she’s stepped down from her role as CEO, she remains the face of the quality assurance testing company, whose clients include Netflix, Microsoft, and Amazon.

Kristel regularly goes viral on LinkedIn by celebrating the team at Testlio and their achievements — undoubtedly raking up big views from potential customers around the globe.

Kristel Kruustuk LinkedIn post

What does this example mean for your company? It’s a good reminder to start small. You can assist one chief evangelist in building up their personal brand and posting regularly. Then later, you can think about involving more and more employees throughout your organization.

5. Semrush’s Content Marketing

Semrush , a popular SEO research and tracking platform, regularly releases high-quality ebooks . This goes to show that content marketing is more than long-form SEO content. To win over your audience with great content, you also need resources that are more actionable, like templates and checklists.

Semrush ebook library

Semrush also produces courses as part of their SEO Academy . Courses like this give your target customers a guided educational experience, which not only helps people understand and use your solution but also shows your commitment to educating your buyers and customers so they can succeed.

6. Employment Hero’s Marketing and Sales Alignment

For Employment Hero , an HR solution complete with payroll and benefits management, it was clear from the start that their digital experience needed to serve their customers. And that not only meant giving buyers easier ways to interact with them, but also refining the handoff between marketing and sales.

Before implementing Drift , Employment Hero found that it could take up to seven days for them to follow up with a request from their website. Now, buyers can easily get the information they need — instantly.

In addition, the team has deployed dozens of different chatbot playbooks that seamlessly guide website visitors from marketing content to sales conversations.

Scott Wilson, CRM Manager at Employment Hero, said, “With Drift, we have somewhere between 40 to 50 different playbooks running across the different parts of our site.” These include playbooks that cater to buyers and assist existing customers, as well as chatbots tailored to specific solutions pages.

With all these playbooks in place, Employment Hero’s marketing team has been able to provide valuable buyer data to their sales team so they can jump into the conversation knowing what leads are interested in, serve up the right content, and ultimately close deals faster.

7. Storyblocks’ PPC Advertising

As a provider for royalty-free videos, music, and photos, Storyblocks is a big proponent of diversity in media. They created the Diversity in Video Report to show content creators and advertisers how the demand for representation has grown.

Storyblocks uses this report in their LinkedIn ads to bring new target customers into the top of their marketing funnel. With this strategy, the company can grow their email list of marketers and content creators so they can nurture them and drive home sales.

Storyblocks Diversity in Video report promoted post

With insights into what users search for when sourcing media, this report helps Storyblocks stand out as a brand that cares about diversity and inclusion while also showing marketers exactly where to turn for better, more diverse stock videos.

Storyblocks Diversity in Video report excerpt

Turn Your B2B Marketing Strategy into Pipeline with Drift

As we’ve shared above, many B2B companies can win by driving higher-quality leads with ABM, social media, paid advertising, and SEO strategies, as well as by improving internal processes, such as with GTM alignment and automated lead nurturing.

But it’s important to remember that ultimately, the right marketing strategy for you will depend on your business needs — be it the solution your offer, your target audience, or your sales cycle.

However, as B2B deals become even longer and involve more and more stakeholders, you’re going to need a way to ensure opportunities don’t fall through the cracks. Drift Conversational Marketing does exactly that by empowering buyers to start conversations on their own, get answers quickly, and connect with sales with just a click of a button.

Want to see what a Conversational Marketing solution looks like on your website? Take Drift for a test drive .

Enterprise League

Business Tips

The ultimate guide to writing a b2b business proposal, march 29, 2022.

Writing effective B2B proposal

You may wonder why you need to write a B2B proposal when you have a top-notch website (which you paid significant money for) with all of your products/services listed there. While this is all valuable and essential in the age of the Internet, you’ll be losing a lot of clients if you just wait for them to see your page.

In other words, you have to take an initiative and establish the relationship by sending them a tailored business proposal which will talk directly to them, and not everyone online. Many of your potential clients don’t know that you even exist. With this in mind, you have to be proactive and present yourself to them.

But what on earth is a B2B business proposal? Or better yet, how do you write one?

What is B2B business proposal?

A business proposal is a written offer from a seller to a prospective [buyer]. – source Wikipedia

In other words, it’s a document you send to your prospective clients to present them your offer. Be it a product or service, it should definitely be something of interest to them. You can’t really sell drilling machines to a marketing agency, right?

Another thing you should be aware of is that B2B proposals can be solicited as well as unsolicited. Either way, each business partnership proposal should be customised to suit the potential buyer’s needs.

What should the B2B business proposal contain?

First things first, before starting to write a proposal you should have the buyer’s requirements in mind. If in your previous conversations they have asked you about something specific, you are supposed to address the matter thoroughly.

Moreover, as with other business documents, there are certain templates to follow. However, remember to not follow them blindly, including this article. In fact, you should create a B2B proposal template that speaks in the same tone as your offer and brand. You don’t want to use Tesla’s template and end up sounding foolish.

Additionally, bear in mind that this B2B proposal is about them, not you.

Here are the three pillars of business partnership proposals:

1. Details about your company – tell them who you are and what you do. Show them why you’re the best choice for them.

2. Show expertise – Let them know that you’ve done your research and identified all their needs and pain points.

3. Present the solution and the cost of it – Explain to them how you’re going to solve their issue and how much you would charge them.

How to write a B2B proposal successfully

B2b sales proposal example.

There are many websites offering free as well as paid templates or examples. They come in very handy if you’re not good with creating visuals or organising documents.

Like we said before, it’s best if you don’t copy-paste B2B proposal templates to the dot. Make it unique to your company, your offer and your client.

Another thing that matters is that you should identify the perfect way and time to deliver the proposal. Yes, you can drop it in someone’s email inbox on Saturday midnight but doesn’t mean you should. Sometimes print proposals delivered in person are the better choice. Conduct a market research to understand your clients and speak in the language they speak.

More must-read stories from Enterprise League:

  • Anyone can do it: Increase your online sales by following these 9 tips.
  • Learn about all the tips and apps you need to successfully manage a remote team .

Engaging online networking events that you should not miss.

Unique ways to show your employees you care about them .

  • Learn about what to do when a client doesn’t pay.

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b2b business plan examples

B2B Marketing Plan Template

B2B (business-to-business) marketing is geared towards organizations or companies rather than individual consumers. Because it’s geared towards an entirely different audience, B2B marketing strategies differ from B2C (business-to-consumer) marketing. 

If you don’t have a B2B marketing plan to outline your buyer persona, budget, promotions and advertising, and other strategies, your efforts won’t be as effective. Take the time to put together a B2B marketing plan that gives your campaigns context, examines your resources, analyzes your current marketing performance, and sets up a strategy to achieve your goals.

Use our B2B marketing plan template to:

  • Dive deep into your market and the competitive landscape
  • Plan content with an editorial calendar
  • Outline marketing campaign goals

Create an Inspiring B2B Marketing Plan

Each slide serves an important role in your B2B marketing plan. Illustrate your points and keep your audience’s attention by using graphics like sales funnels, Gantt charts, area graphs, timelines, and more. Each of these is available with your B2B marketing plan template and can be added in an instant. Use our B2B marketing plan example as a guide for creating your presentation:

Title Slide

Pro Tips for Using a B2B Marketing Plan Template

Follow these tips and tricks when building your B2B marketing plan template.

Avoid the temptation to crowd your slides with text or graphics. Be concise, and stick to one topic per slide.

What actions should your audience take after your presentation is finished? Include next steps to prompt them to take action.

It’s easy to get bogged down in the numbers and little details. Use graphics to transform your data, making your presentation easy to follow.

Where is your company now and where does it plan to go with your marketing plan? Frame your presentation as a story so it’s more appealing and memorable.

More Popular Templates

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6 Real-Life Target Audience Examples to Help You Define Your Own (B2B and B2C)

target audience examples - hero image

Target audience research allows you to better understand your potential customer(s) and their underlying pain points.

The more you drill down into your high-value audience groups through strategic market segmentation, the closer you are to your next sale.

Learn the ins and outs of target marketing with plenty of examples to inform your strategy.

What Is a Target Audience?

How a target audience differs from a buyer persona, how psychographic and demographic data informs marketing campaigns.

  • How To Analyze and Define Your Target Audience

Do Target Audiences Vary by Channel?

3 b2b target audience examples.

  • 3 B2C Target Audience Examples

A target audience is a group of consumers within a predefined target market that has been identified as the best recipients for a particular marketing message. And a target market broadly describes B2C or B2B consumers who care about your product or service and, under the right conditions, are most likely to spend money with your company.

An audience is a segment within that market.

For example, the target market for an online bookkeeping tool might include businesses with over $500K in annual revenue.

So a target audience profile for our bookkeeping program might be technology stakeholders with influence on decision-makers at companies that haven’t reviewed their accounting software needs in over two years. It’s much more specific than our target market, which is important because we can craft content marketing collateral that speaks directly to the challenges and needs of this influential group.

To create effective messaging within your marketing campaigns, you first need to define your target audience.

When marketers try to appeal to the broadest possible audience for their products and services, they often end up feeling exhausted without much to show for their efforts. Their messaging seems inauthentic and doesn’t really resonate with anyone in particular.

To create effective messaging within your marketing campaigns, you first need to define your target audience. Doing so will help you engage key decision-makers and eventually convert them into loyal customers.

At this point, you might be asking, “Isn’t that just a buyer persona?” And while the two concepts are similar, they are distinct enough to warrant further discussion.

A buyer persona is a fictional character who represents one of your ideal customers . They have names, occupations, likes and dislikes, as well as challenges and ambitions.

While target audiences are valuable tools for many types of content marketing campaigns, buyer personas tend to be more useful in a B2B context, because they focus on challenges and business information. For example, a B2C company that sells protein bars would not need to create multiple personas, because people from many backgrounds and with varying job titles might purchase their products.

In a B2B context, targeting personas can be extremely valuable, especially when employing content marketing strategies. A SaaS company might create personas for each stakeholder involved in the buying process, for instance. An HR persona might be interested in blog content that addresses common pain points, while a CFO persona would be more interested in white papers with lots of data.

Personas aren’t entirely without value to B2C marketers, however. They can serve as useful guides when crafting messages to engage and inform consumers.

A persona typically includes:

  • Personal information: Name, age and geographic location.
  • Content preferences: Favorite channels, content formats, tone and style.
  • Business background information: Job title, level of influence in decision making processes.
  • Objectives: Measurable goals related to the persona’s job.
  • Challenges: Frustrations and pain points standing in the way of the persona’s goals.

Your target audiences should be informed by both demographic and psychographic information. The former category describes your intended audience on a superficial level, while the latter describes their motivations.

  • Demographics may include cursory information such as gender, age, income and marital status.
  • Psychographics include personal interests, attitudes, values, desires and specific behaviors.

When defining and targeting an audience, demographics will only get you so far. For example, if you’re promoting a B2B SaaS solution, your specific audience may be made up of men and women ages 35-49 who earn more than $100,000 annually. That’s all good information to have, but it applies to too broad of a cohort.

Psychographic data for this specific audience could include: worrying about lost resources throughout a supply chain, wanting to eliminate redundancies, or being skeptical of flashy new technology.

Combined, demographic and psychographic information can help you fine-tune your audience targeting goals.

Combined, demographic and psychographic information can help you fine-tune your audience targeting goals. The challenge is where to find this data. Psychographic research may include interviewing existing clients, conducting polls and analyzing your site traffic.

How to Analyze and Define Your Target Audience

Defining the target audience for a particular marketing campaign requires data. Unfortunately, there isn’t a crystal ball that can tell you how to adjust your messages to bring in the right audience. But that’s not to say you can’t trust your gut.

You know your business better than anyone, so combine that experience with hard data to generate a market segment and target audience that is characteristically human, and also strategically defined by scientifically gathered data.

b2b business plan examples

A Three-Step Approach To Defining A Target Audience

1. Conduct target customer research

Your business plan , content marketing strategy, professional experience and prior knowledge of your target customers will lay the foundation for your research. Compile all of your existing intelligence on your target market, and look for opportunities to learn more about it. For example, you might know that most of your customers are senior-level business people, but you may not know if they all have the same job title, or if they all consume content through the same channels.

To uncover key audience insights, use Google Analytics to drill down into your site traffic and perform a deep audience analysis. Custom audience reports can show you demographic and psychographic data, geographic locations as well as the types of technology your site visitors use.

2. Analyze the market

Once you know a little more about your target customers and have compared that data with your business process or goals, it’s time to get some context. Not only are you attempting to place the right messages in front of the right people at the right time, but you’re also competing with potentially thousands of other messages.

Review your competitors’ marketing efforts and business plans to better understand what you’re up against. Likewise, you’ll want to be aware of any other campaigns your business is currently running, as you don’t want to cannibalize your share of audience attention.

3. Define the audience

With hard data in tow and a thorough understanding of your audience’s interests, challenges and needs, it’s time to create a concise target audience to which you can direct your content marketing efforts.

Ask yourself these questions as you work to define your target audience:

  • What problems does your product or service solve?
  • Which demographic characteristics influence the decision-making process?
  • Which psychographic traits impact content consumption?
  • How does your audience prefer to engage with brands similar to yours?
  • Is your audience segment large enough?

That last question is particularly important, because it will prevent you from sinking resources into ultra-niche campaigns with low ROI. Niche marketing is certainly a useful tactic, but your target audiences should represent a group large enough to reach through social and organic channels.

3-step approach to defining target audience

Knowing your intended audience is only one half of the equation. The next step in the target audience analysis process is to determine where this group consumes content so you can develop an actionable marketing strategy.

Depending on the demographic and psychographic data you’ve collected, some channels will be more effective at engaging your intended audience than others. For instance, some decision-makers in a market segment may be more likely to open an email than to click on a social media ad.

Within channels, a specific audience may prefer unique platforms. B2B buyers are more inclined to seek out information on LinkedIn than Instagram, for example.

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(Keep in mind the following custom audiences are meant to inform specific campaign messages! These companies may have different audience segments for other targeting efforts. Each example is based on a real client I’ve worked with.)

1. Bookkeeping SaaS Solution

Key demographics

  • Age range: 35-49.
  • Gender: 65% male, 35% female.
  • Common job titles: Head of Digital, Senior Accountant, Chief Financial Officer.

Key psychographics

  • Values job security.
  • Likes to review all the data before making a decision.
  • Striving for a better work-life balance.
  • Skeptical of solutions that promise to solve all their problems.
  • Their current digital solution is showing its age.
  • Current lack of third-party integration is slowing down internal processes.
  • Boss/shareholder demands are making work stressful.

Preferred channels

  • Email for first contact, then phone conversations.
  • Browses social media platforms like LinkedIn , mostly looking for news.

Preferred content types

  • Data-rich white papers.
  • Case studies.

target audience examples - example 1

2. Business Travel Company

  • Age range: 30-55.
  • Gender: 70% female, 30% male.
  • Common job titles: Procurement Officer, Travel Buyer, Supplier Relations Expert.
  • Values relationships when working with suppliers.
  • Dislikes working on repetitive, mundane tasks.
  • Is wary of handing off responsibilities to a third party.
  • Suppliers fail to deliver on promised rates.
  • Doesn’t have enough data to make informed decisions.
  • Not familiar with ground-level travel concerns.
  • Looks for answers via organic search.
  • Communicates with other procurement professionals on social media platforms.
  • Easily digestible blog posts.

target audience examples - example 2

3. Facility Security Services

  • Age range: 45-60.
  • Gender: 80% male, 20% female.
  • Common job titles: Facility Manager, Head of Security.
  • Doesn’t like drawn-out negotiations.
  • Likes to be prepared for everything; gets nervous when things are uncertain.
  • Prefers to get pitches from two or three companies before making a decision.
  • Needs to save costs, but isn’t willing to sacrifice quality of service.
  • Needs a third-party supplier with technology integrations.
  • Email for marketing materials.
  • Blogs and news sites for industry trends.
  • Data-rich infographics.
  • Email newsletters.

target audience examples - example 3

B2C Target Audience Examples

4. athletic shoes.

  • Age range: 18-29
  • Gender: 60% male, 40% female
  • Wants to look stylish, but doesn’t like to follow trends.
  • Looks up to sports figures.
  • Strongly values friendships and community.
  • Loyal to one or two athletic brands.
  • Finding athletic footwear that is both stylish and comfortable.
  • Loves the look of designer sneakers, but can’t afford them.
  • Follows athletes and influencers on social media.
  • Watches sponsored events on YouTube.
  • Looks for exercise tips on Google.
  • Social media posts.
  • Image-rich articles.

target audience examples -example 4

5. Organic Protein Bars

  • Age range: 18-35.
  • Gender: 50% female, 50% male.
  • Strives to eat food that is nutritious and sustainable, but isn’t always successful.
  • Loves to hang out with friends in nature.
  • Feels loyalty toward brands with values similar to their own.
  • Finds it difficult to eat healthy food when they’re busy.
  • Has a limited food budget.
  • Needs a protein source that is compact and easy to transport.
  • Follows nature photography accounts on Instagram.
  • Watches supplement reviews on YouTube.
  • Follows health gurus on Twitter.
  • Event marketing.

target audience examples - example 5

6. Credit Union Mortgage Products

  • Age range: 25-39.
  • Gender: 50% male, 50% female.
  • Enjoys spending time with friends and family at home.
  • Tries to spend their money wisely, but isn’t always sure how to do that.
  • Craves stability, but fears another economic recession.
  • Feels anxious every time they think about having a mortgage.
  • Is thinking about mortgages for the first time ever.
  • Unclear on the difference between a bank and a credit union.
  • Reads online news sites.
  • Downloads how-to guides online.
  • Watches home-hunting videos on YouTube.

target audience examples - example 6

When you have well-defined, custom audiences informed by strong research, you can stop waiting for buyers to stumble upon your brand and start actively pursuing them with precise messaging.

b2b business plan examples

Editor’s note: Updated November 2021.

Michael O'Neill

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b2b business plan examples

Mike O'Neill is a writer, editor and content manager in Chicago. When he's not keeping a close eye on Brafton's editorial content, he's auditioning to narrate the next Ken Burns documentary. All buzzwords are his own.

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How to Create a B2B Sales Plan (a GTM Guide)

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For sales managers, planning for the future can feel quite different from stomping out fires in the present. Efficiently structuring your market opportunities and deploying your sales team to match is how sales leaders translate high-level strategy into execution in the field.

Sales planning is complex, especially in B2B. Complexity creates opportunities. The more that sales organizations can organize their customers and prospects and then empower their sales team to effectively deliver on those opportunities, the more successful they’ll be at beating the competition.

Read on to learn what sales planning is, how to optimize it in B2B, and what best practices develop a successful sales planning process.

What is Sales Planning?

Sales Planning is how a sales organization slices up the market and aligns its sales team to fit. Sales planning is the crucial link that connects high-level strategy—goals, markets, products—with execution in the field.

By optimizing its sales planning, a sales organization can make sure that it pairs the right salespeople with the right accounts and that it groups accounts most efficiently. It can ensure that the way it organizes customers and prospects remains in sync with the company’s overall sales goals. Good sales planning also puts a company’s salespeople in the best position to succeed.

Sales planning comprises the key building blocks of a sales strategy: sales quota planning, territory planning, account segmentation and scoring, and sales capacity planning. By optimizing these and connecting them to one another, a sales organization can increase the productivity of its sales force, reduce attrition and, ideally, raise its bottom line.

What’s the difference between Sales Planning and a Sales Plan?

A sales plan is something a sales leader (or a team of sales leaders) make once, or maybe once a year; sales planning is an ongoing activity. In this way, companies who shift from making a sales plan to doing sales planning year-round are able to stay more flexible and can more quickly adapt to market or other business changes.

The transition from making a sales plan to doing sales planning becomes more important the more a sales team grows and a company’s sales strategy matures. As the sales strategy integrates more and more moving pieces—which can be people, products, territories, customers, markets, currencies, geographies, or any other element—it’s critical that sales leadership be able to address changes as they happen.

Rather than seeing a sales plan as an inflexible framework that to be rigidly adhered to at all moments, sales leaders should view sales planning as an evolving set of modifiable guidelines that help a sales organization best fulfill its goals. Taking this approach helps a sales team to figure out the best way to address its key priorities, even if those priorities change.

4 Steps to Create a Sales Plan in B2B

Sales planning generally includes those aspects of the sales strategy that deal with organizing prospects and coordinating the sales team, including account segmentation and scoring, sales quota planning, territory planning, and sales capacity planning.

Account Segmentation and Scoring

Account segmentation and scoring is how sales organizations classify and group their opportunities. Doing both effectively helps sales teams understand which markets, products, and customers they should target to best grow their business, which opportunities are ripe for cross-selling or upselling, and how the company’s salespeople are best deployed.

Both account segmentation and account scoring exert a downstream influence in the sales organization, helping determine how that organization plans its territories and quotas, how it makes its forecasts, and how it interacts with other parts of the organization, including marketing and HR.

The key steps for evaluating sales opportunities

There are three key steps for developing an initial understanding of sales opportunities:

Define account segments

A good segmentation strategy begins with knowing which attributes are most important to your company’s success, and which allow you to most efficiently group accounts by sales strategy. Accounts can be grouped by any number of criteria: industry, revenue, prior-year sales, employee headcount, wallet share, tenure, and more. Any of these may correlate with your product offerings (perhaps you have different products for different-sized companies, or companies in different industries), or with the salespeople in your company (perhaps your salespeople are better equipped to sell to companies in the same industry, even if those companies have different sizes. Perhaps the opposite is true.).

You can additionally segment accounts based on whether they are active or pipeline accounts that require further nurturing. Classifying accounts in this way can help you forecast revenues for the quarter or year.

Assess account potential

Sales managers are often lured by the rush of chasing after new business—but it’s often easier, faster, and cheaper to sell to an existing customer than to get a foot in the door with a new account. Take a look at prior-year sales and identify key active accounts with large expansion opportunity. Then calculate the potential ROI of devoting different resources to existing accounts versus potential new ones.

Collaborate with front-line salespeople but incorporate actual data

Make prioritizing and ranking accounts a collaborative process between sales leaders and front-line salespeople, like field managers and sales reps. Front-line teams work with your customers daily and often have valuable insights that can help calculate account growth potential versus exhausted accounts.

At the same time, make sure that you have data to reinforce whatever hunches your sales people might have. In this way, account segmentation can be a bi-directional process: front-line salespeople can give you insights into how to read your data, and data can help front-line salespeople better prioritize their activities.

Sales Quota Planning

Did you know that 50 percent of organizations create five to ten iterations of their sales quota plans before rolling those quotas out to the field? Here are some tips for setting more effective sales quotas.

Weigh past performance against future opportunity

Many organizations set their sales quotas based on the historical performance of individual sales reps, but that can unintentionally discourage collaboration or penalize your best salespeople. Instead of simply upping last year’s quotas, take a closer look at the overall market opportunity and make sure your quotas are encouraging the behaviors that best fit the unique drivers in your market.

Use technology to monitor and measure the results

The key for setting better quotas is to use the right technology to evaluate effectiveness. “The right technology” means technology designed to do this sort of work.

For example, you’re probably using a CRM to monitor data for leaders and sales teams and to keep track of leads, calendars events, meetings, and deadlines. But this kind of technology doesn’t collect the information you need to design good quotas. Nor can it consolidate, reorganize, and track data in the forms you need.

Instead, you need technology that can collect and analyze sales data automatically, and that can supply this data when you need it.

Strike the right balance

Setting sales quotas is all about balance. Sales quotas need to meet the needs of your sales reps, your sales managers, and your company as a whole, while also syncing with your company’s overall business strategy. With a more transparent process, you’ll get sales reps buy-in to their sales quotas, which leads to their working harder toward reaching and exceeding those goals because they believe in the process and understand the decisions that produced those quotas.

Create a consistent process

A recent Anaplan survey found that 38 percent of companies suffer from a “lack of effective processes” when setting quotas. At many companies, the process changes yearly. For example, different sales reps might be assigned higher or lower quotas based on their past performance. When these kinds of variables are arbitrary, reps tend to ignore them. To keep both your field and leadership happy, determine a consistent process and stick to year after year.

Territory Planning

A recent article in Harvard Business Review found that by optimizing their sales territories, sales organizations can increase sales by two-to-seven percent without changing anything else about their strategy and without allocating resources any differently. Indeed, it’s crucial to evolve your territory and quota strategy to keep up as business priorities and objectives change.

Here are three tips for taking the guesswork out of territory planning and integrating your territory planning into your overall enterprise performance management strategy:

Use a data-driven approach

Territory and quota planning needs to be part of your team’s overall sales forecasting and sales analytics processes. Your organization likely has a massive amount of sales data. Look for ways to use this data to gain insights into where the biggest opportunities lie and how those opportunities are spread across your sales territories. Locate territories that show signs of growth and assign reps whose strengths best align with these opportunities. Make sure that your territory assignments and sales quotas are based on real data and solid trends, not just wishful thinking.

Listen to front-line sales managers and reps

As with quota-planning, creating sales territories should be a collaborative process. Instead of handing down the latest territory assignments from the top, work with sales managers and sales reps to get the latest intelligence from the front lines. Which territories are seen as particularly promising, and which ones are the backwaters that no one wants to work and why? Sales people are hyper-aware of opportunities, so take advantage of their insights and intuition to build a stronger sales performance management program.

Make a “living” plan

In the business of sales, you often have to improvise and respond to unforeseen circumstances. A territory plan should be similarly flexible. Be willing to modify your territory plans based on shifts in the economy, changing business priorities, or headcount changes.

Like “sales planning” versus “a sales plan,” territory plans shouldn’t be fixed entities; they should evolve with your sales strategy.

It’s for this reason that cloud-based sales planning tools are crucial for maintaining your territory plans. They’re far more flexible than any other solutions. Massive spreadsheets and legacy systems do not offer flexibility or visibility into scenario-based planning. With a cloud-based tool that gives a view into the whole sales organization, sales leaders can foresee the affects a change in territory or account strategy will have and can focus their teams on the most profitable accounts and regions.

With the right data-driven approach, enhanced collaboration, and the ability to do scenario-based planning, territory and quota plans can better align with overall revenue projections, as well as your organization’s big-picture business strategy.

Sales Capacity Planning

Having the right number of sales people deployed in all of the sales territories and assigned quota targets is critical to capturing all market opportunities and meeting revenue targets.

Sales Capacity Planning allows Sales and HR professionals to plan, model, and optimize the sales capacity and resource requirements, ensuring that the sales organization has complete coverage in all territories, eliminating the risk of unassigned quotas.

Top-down vs. bottom-up capacity planning

  • Top-down Sales Capacity Planning: Take the goal and build a model that lists your current team and their quotas, and then add the “to be hired” assets to get enough quota coverage to hit the goal.
  • Bottom-up Sales Capacity Planning: Look at your past performance, new information pertinent to the coming year, and your rate limiting factors, and build a model that will predict how much you can do.

Three steps to successful capacity planning

  • Align sales capacity and resource requirements with territory and quota plans. Ensure that the sales team is leveraging every opportunity to meet revenue and quota targets.
  • Connect sales capacity plans with HR hiring and recruitment plans. Make sure HR is recruiting and hiring the right number of sales reps at the right time for sales onboarding and training.
  • Quickly identify sales capacity and resource gaps. Understand the impact of covering all sales territories and attaining quota targets.

How should you prepare for the Sales Planning process?

According to SiriusDecisions, preparation should begin at least 30 days before sales leadership gets together. To prepare, stakeholders should assemble the previous year’s sales and productivity data: customer counts, channel information, revenue by product, revenue by geography or business units, overall profits, costs, and anything else that can help with the processes described above. It’s key that sales leadership validate the data to ensure that it’s trustworthy.

Once sales leaders have collected data, they should comb through it to locate problem areas. Observing data in different time dimensions (yearly, quarterly, monthly) can help isolate trends, and potential areas of future success.

Before sales planning meetings, trends and conclusions drawn from the data should be packaged in a reader-friendly format and distributed to all stakeholders with enough time for decision-makers to internalize the results.

What are some best practices for Sales Planning?

Making sales planning easier can sometimes be a matter of adopting best practices and maintaining them as goals change. For example:

  • Cross-organization collaboration

Because sales planning is about aligning the nuts and bolts of a sales strategy to corporate goals and objectives, sales planning needs to be viewed as a collaborative and interactive process. Planning meetings should involve stakeholders from across the organization. Be sure to include:

  • Sales: CSO, Sales Operations, Sales Enablement
  • Marketing: CMO, Marketing Operations
  • Product: Head of Product, Product Marketing
  • Gain a clear line of sight

To gain a competitive edge, sales leaders need to maintain clear line of sight into the behaviors of their sales reps and the reasons for those behaviors. In many companies, for example, sales reps find that too much of their time is spent on administrative tasks. OpenSymmetry states that that 65 percent of sales leaders report that spending too much time on non-selling activities is a top business issue for sales in the coming year. On the other hand, when companies invest in best-in-class sales performance management solutions, they experience 25 percent lower turnover rates, 36 percent shorter sales cycles, and seven percent more sales reps making their quota.

  • Use metrics that matter

The sales organization’s ability to collect valid data over multiple years is critical to sales planning. Advanced technology can help extract nuggets of insight from vast amounts of data.

  • Integrate your tools

Tools add efficiency to the sales planning process and make everything more accurate—but only if they are part of an integrated tool kit. To be done right, sales planning requires data from marketing, finance, workforce, and whatever business intelligence tools your organization uses. By adopting better tools, you can calculate territories and quotas much more quickly.

  • Retain top talent

According to the BMS Quarterly Sales Index, 56 percent of sales leaders report that retaining good performers will be a big problem for them in the coming year. Adding to the problem is the fact that different companies lose talent for different reasons, which makes it hard to develop a universal solution. Because of this, many sales leaders simply increase salaries, hoping that this will retain the best people. Although this may work in the short term, retaining talent in the long term requires sales leaders to create a culture in which salespeople are able to do their best work.

What is the future of Sales Planning?

As sales organizations develop their sales planning, the more successful ones will adopt the practices described above: turning the yearly sales plan into ongoing sales planning; coordinating stakeholders from across the organization; adopting advanced technology to automate sales planning processes; using modeling capabilities to plan out new territory and quota scenarios.

As the sales world continues to develop, companies who can plan most effectively will be those who continue to beat their competitors. We encourage you to learn more about how sales planning software can help you meet these goals.

Empower your go-to-market strategy and innovate the ways you compete with Anaplan for Sales

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by Joseph Jones • August 2, 2023

b2b business plan examples

20 B2B Examples You Need to See

Last Updated: August 2023

You may see the term B2B or B2C from time to time. Those are acronyms used to categorize who businesses primarily sell to. B2C, or “business-to-consumer,” means a company that sells its products directly to consumers. When you purchase something from Amazon, for example, you are the consumer and either Amazon or an Amazon seller is the business. 

One significant type of business transaction is business-to-business (B2B), wherein businesses sell products, services, or information to other businesses rather than to individual consumers. B2B plays a crucial role in the global economy, facilitating trade and collaboration between enterprises and industries. Let’s explore what B2B is, and then take a look at some B2B examples by highlighting 20 of the best B2B companies.

Jump to a Section

What is a b2b business, b2b examples in e-commerce.

B2B Examples Across Industries

  • Oracle Corporation
  • General Electric

Quick e-Com B2B Facts

Sourced from Zippia .

  • In 2022, U.S. B2B e-commerce revenue exceeded $2 trillion .
  • Nurtured B2B leads tend to generate larger purchases than non-nutured leads. 47% larger purchases were made by nurtured leads vs non-nutured.
  • Roughly 68% of B2B businesses haven’t identified their sales funnel.
  • Advertising spend for B2B companies in the U.S. amounted to over $22.14 billion in 2022.

Business-to-Business (B2B) commerce encompasses a broad spectrum of transactions, from raw materials procurement to finished product distribution and everything in between. An example of B2B would be as between a wholesaler and a retailer or as between a manufacturer and a wholesaler. Unlike Business-to-Consumer (B2C) transactions, B2B deals often involve larger order quantities and more complex negotiations.

B2B (business-to-business) e-commerce plays a pivotal role in the modern business landscape. If you run a B2B e-commerce company, you need to know the things that e-commerce has to offer the marketplace.

Here are some examples of B2B e-commerce key contributions to improved business transactions:

  • Enhanced Efficiency: B2B e-commerce streamlines the buying and selling processes, reducing the need for manual intervention. Automated online catalogs, real-time inventory updates, and electronic order processing lead to quicker transactions and fewer errors. This efficiency translates into time savings and improved productivity for both buyers and sellers.
  • Wider Market Reach: With B2B e-commerce, businesses can transcend geographical boundaries and access a global market. Companies can expand their customer base and connect with potential clients from different parts of the world, opening up new growth opportunities.
  • Cost Savings: B2B e-commerce eliminates the need for extensive physical infrastructure and traditional sales channels, resulting in significant cost savings for both buyers and sellers. Companies can reduce overhead costs associated with maintaining brick-and-mortar stores and sales teams.
  • Data-Driven Insights: B2B e-commerce platforms generate valuable data on customer behavior, purchasing patterns, and preferences. Analyzing this data empowers businesses with actionable insights to optimize marketing strategies, improve product offerings, and enhance customer experiences.
  • Efficient Inventory Management: B2B e-commerce integrates with inventory management systems, providing real-time visibility into stock levels and demand trends. This ensures that businesses can maintain optimal inventory levels, avoid stockouts, and reduce carrying costs.
  • Digital Marketing and Branding: B2B e-commerce enables businesses to leverage digital marketing techniques like SEO , content marketing, and social media to enhance their brand visibility and attract new customers. It allows even small companies to compete on a global stage based on the strength of their online presence.
  • Support for Complex Sales Processes: In B2B transactions, most decision-making involves multiple stakeholders. E-commerce platforms facilitate easy access to product information, quotes, and other relevant data, making it simpler for all involved parties to arrive at a consensus.

Overall, e-commerce B2B plays a vital role in how businesses conduct trade and interact with customers and partners. Its significance lies in empowering businesses to be more agile, competitive, and customer-focused in an increasingly digital and interconnected world. 

B2B Examples

1. salesforce.

A pioneer in cloud-based CRM software, Salesforce is a great example of a B2B company due to several key factors. First and foremost, its cloud-based CRM solutions revolutionized the way businesses manage customer relationships, sales, and marketing activities, providing scalable and flexible tools accessible to businesses of all sizes. Salesforce’s customer-centric approach is evident in its commitment to understanding and addressing the unique needs of its clients, fostering strong relationships, and providing excellent customer support. Salesforce’s success also stems from its ability to integrate with other business tools and technologies, offering a comprehensive ecosystem that enhances overall efficiency and productivity for its clients. Through these strategic initiatives, Salesforce has established itself as a leader in the B2B domain and continues to set industry standards for CRM solutions and customer-focused services.

Salesforce’s Annual Revenue

Often referred to as the “Amazon of the East,” Alibaba is a leading online B2B platform based in China. It connects millions of buyers and sellers worldwide, facilitating international trade across various industries. Alibaba is a successful B2B company due to its vast global reach and comprehensive platform that connects millions of suppliers with buyers worldwide. Its user-friendly interface, secure payment systems, and efficient logistics infrastructure have facilitated seamless international trade for businesses, offering them a wide range of products and services at competitive prices. Additionally, Alibaba’s continuous focus on innovation and strategic partnerships has further solidified its position as a leading B2B e-commerce platform in the rapidly expanding global market.

Alibaba’s Annual Revenue

3. Microsoft

Microsoft is a successful B2B company with a diverse portfolio of business solutions, including cloud services, productivity tools, and enterprise software. Its reliable and widely adopted products, such as Microsoft Office and Azure cloud platform, cater to the specific needs of businesses, boosting productivity and efficiency. Additionally, Microsoft’s strong reputation for security, extensive partner network, and commitment to continuous innovation have established it as a trusted and indispensable partner for businesses worldwide.

Microsoft’s Annual Revenue

As an inbound marketing and sales platform, HubSpot helps businesses attract, engage, and delight customers. Its all-in-one suite includes tools for content management, email marketing, and social media management. Its user-friendly interface, comprehensive analytics, and automation capabilities make it a valuable tool for businesses seeking to optimize their marketing and sales efforts. HubSpot’s commitment to educating and supporting its customers through a vast library of resources and a thriving community has fostered strong customer loyalty, contributing to its success in the B2B market.

HubSpot’s Annual Revenue

5. Oracle Corporation

Oracle Corporation has achieved remarkable success as a B2B company due to several key factors. Firstly, its extensive range of enterprise software solutions caters to various business needs, such as database management, cloud services, and enterprise applications. Secondly, Oracle’s strong focus on innovation and continuous development of cutting-edge technologies keeps it at the forefront of the industry, attracting businesses seeking advanced solutions. Lastly, its robust customer support, global reach, and strategic acquisitions have contributed to building strong relationships with enterprises worldwide, solidifying Oracle’s position as a leading B2B provider.

Oracle’s Annual Revenue

SAP’s success as a B2B company can be attributed to several key factors. Firstly, its comprehensive suite of business software solutions addresses diverse enterprise needs, including ERP, CRM, and supply chain management. Secondly, SAP’s emphasis on industry-specific solutions and scalability makes it a preferred choice for businesses of all sizes, from small companies to large enterprises. Lastly, its strong focus on customer relationships, continuous innovation, and global presence have established SAP as a trusted and reliable partner in the B2B market.

SAP’s Annual Revenue

As a global aerospace company, Boeing is a prominent B2B player, supplying commercial and military aircraft, satellites, and related services to governments and airlines worldwide. Boeing is successful in the B2B domain primarily due to its leadership in the aerospace industry and its ability to build strong relationships with other businesses. Its reputation for delivering high-quality, technologically advanced solutions, coupled with effective customer support and after-sales services, has contributed to its long-standing success as a B2B company. Additionally, Boeing’s extensive network of suppliers and partners further enhances its position in the B2B market, allowing it to cater to diverse customer needs and maintain its competitive edge.

Boeing’s Annual Revenue

8. Mailchimp

Mailchimp is successful as a B2B model due to its user-friendly email marketing platform, catering to businesses of all sizes. Its intuitive interface, automation features, and analytics capabilities empower businesses to create and manage effective email marketing campaigns. Mailchimp’s commitment to continuous innovation, seamless integrations with other business tools, and excellent customer support have helped it build a loyal customer base and establish itself as a leading B2B solution in the email marketing industry.

Mailchimp’s Annual Revenue

International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) is a renowned B2B technology company, offering a diverse range of services, including cloud computing, AI solutions, and enterprise software. Additionally, IBM’s long-standing reputation for reliability, global reach, and strong customer relationships has positioned it as a trusted partner for businesses worldwide, contributing to its sustained success in the B2B market.

IBM’s Annual Revenue

Slack is a great B2B model due to its efficient and user-friendly collaboration platform. By offering a centralized space for team communication, file sharing, and integration with various business tools, Slack enhances productivity and streamlines communication within organizations. Its customizable features, scalability, and focus on real-time collaboration make it a valuable asset for businesses of all sizes, fostering seamless teamwork and efficient workflows.

Slack’s Annual Revenue

Asana is a great B2B model thanks to its comprehensive project management and productivity platform. Its highly customizable interface, versatile task management features, and integration with numerous third-party apps enable businesses to tailor the platform to their specific needs. Asana’s focus on collaboration, task automation, and real-time updates makes it a valuable tool for teams looking to streamline their workflows and improve overall efficiency.

Asana’s Annual Revenue

12. Airtable

Airtable is a great B2B model because of its flexible and user-friendly database management platform. With its intuitive interface, customizable workflows, and powerful collaboration features, AirTable empowers businesses to organize and track data efficiently across various projects and teams, making it an invaluable asset for streamlining processes and enhancing productivity.

Airtable’s Annual Revenue

Intel is successful as a B2B model due to its reputation as a leading semiconductor manufacturer and technology innovator. Its high-performance processors and chipsets cater to a wide range of industries, including computer manufacturers, data centers, and IoT devices. Intel’s consistent focus on research, development, and product advancements has solidified its position as a reliable partner for businesses seeking cutting-edge technology solutions, contributing to its ongoing success in the B2B market.

Intel’s Annual Revenue

14. General Electric (GE)

GE is a great B2B model with a diversified portfolio of industrial products and services. With offerings ranging from power generation and aviation to healthcare and renewable energy solutions, GE caters to various B2B sectors, making it a preferred choice for businesses seeking innovative and reliable industrial technologies. Its global presence, extensive expertise, and commitment to sustainability further contribute to its success as a trusted partner in the B2B market.

General Electric’s Annual Revenue

Adobe makes a good B2B model due to its suite of creative and digital marketing solutions. Its software products, including Adobe Creative Cloud and Adobe Experience Cloud, empower businesses to create engaging content, design captivating visuals, and optimize customer experiences. Adobe’s industry-leading tools, continuous innovation, and seamless integrations make it a valuable asset for businesses seeking to enhance their creative processes and digital marketing efforts, contributing to its success in the B2B market.

Adobe’s Annual Revenue

FedEx is a good model for B2B due to its extensive logistics network and reliable shipping services. Businesses can rely on FedEx’s efficient delivery solutions to transport their goods globally, ensuring timely and secure deliveries to their customers. With a strong emphasis on customer service, real-time tracking capabilities, and a range of shipping options, FedEx has established itself as a trusted partner for B2B companies looking to streamline their supply chain and meet their shipping needs.

FedEx’s Annual Revenue

Cisco is a good B2B model for several reasons. Firstly, its wide range of networking and communication solutions cater to businesses of all sizes, providing them with reliable and scalable infrastructure for their operations. Secondly, Cisco’s commitment to innovation and advancements in technologies like networking, cybersecurity, and cloud computing keeps it at the forefront of the industry, attracting businesses seeking cutting-edge solutions. Additionally, Cisco’s extensive global presence, strong partner ecosystem, and excellent customer support further contribute to its success as a trusted B2B provider.

Cisco’s Annual Revenue

18. Qualtrics

Qualtrics makes a good B2B model due to its powerful experience management platform. With its advanced survey and data analytics capabilities, Qualtrics empowers businesses to gather valuable customer and employee feedback, enabling them to make data-driven decisions and improve their products and services. Its user-friendly interface, real-time insights, and customizable features make it a valuable tool for businesses looking to enhance their customer experience and drive growth.

Qualtrics’ Annual Revenue

You might see Amazon as a B2C business at first, but truly, it’s focused on advertisers and businesses. Amazon is an excellent example of B2B e-commerce as a model due to its vast and diverse marketplace, providing businesses with access to a wide range of products and suppliers. With features like Amazon Business, businesses can streamline their procurement processes, access bulk pricing, and enjoy business-specific benefits, making it a convenient and cost-effective platform for B2B transactions. Additionally, Amazon’s efficient logistics and reliable delivery services ensure timely and convenient shipments, further contributing to its success as a trusted B2B provider.

Amazon’s Annual Revenue

Upwork makes a good B2B model due to its online freelancing platform, which connects businesses with skilled professionals from around the world. With a diverse pool of talent, businesses can find specialized expertise for their projects and scale their workforce as needed, offering flexibility and cost-effectiveness. Upwork’s user-friendly interface, secure payment system, and efficient project management tools make it a valuable platform for businesses seeking to outsource tasks and collaborate with freelancers seamlessly.

Upwork’s Annual Revenue

These B2B Examples Are Just the Start

Business-to-Business (B2B) transactions have become an integral part of the global economy, driving collaboration and trade between businesses and industries. The examples of B2B companies mentioned above exemplify the diversity and importance of this sector in powering businesses worldwide.

What have you done to make your B2B model work for your company? Let us know in the comments!

Joseph Jones

Joseph Jones

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  2. How to Create a Winning B2B Sales Plan [+ Free Template]

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  3. 8+ B2B Business Plan Templates

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  4. 12 B2B Marketing Strategies For 2023 || B2B marketing Strategies

  5. B2B Marketing Plan 2023 || What Is B2B Marketing?

  6. Business Plan Examples

COMMENTS

  1. B2B Business Plan Template [2024]

    The first step to step into this business is to create a B2B business plan template. For that you should explore what is B2B startup and read some B2B business plan examples. In a B2B startup business plan you should include your strategic plan, financial plan, customer segments, and marketing analysis. Step2: Create the Brand.

  2. 8+ B2B Business Plan Templates

    Example of B2B Business Plan. pro.europeana.eu. Details. File Format. PDF; Size: 2 MB Download Now. 4. Gather the Documents Pertaining to Your Business. Your potential investors are going to want to know if your business is going to earn money. So what they'll want are the documents that can show them the potential figures that your business ...

  3. ASP B2B Technology Business Plan Example

    Discover Productions, Inc. (Discover Productions) is a Business-to-Business (B2B) technology consulting company supplying turn-key computing solutions based upon the latest technology and utilizing Web-based applications. Utilizing state-of-the-art software and hardware in their 24×7 computing facility, Discover Productions also offers e ...

  4. The Ultimate Guide to B2B Marketing in 2023 [+ New Data]

    B2B (business-to-business) marketing refers to any marketing strategy or content that is geared towards a business or organization. Companies that sell products or services to other businesses or organizations (vs. consumers) typically use B2B marketing strategies. ... Featured Resource: Free Marketing Plan Template. Click here to download ...

  5. 10 B2B Marketing Plan Examples To Help You Stay Organized

    #4: Brainrider's B2B Content Marketing Strategy Template. Detailed and easy to understand, this plan runs through B2B marketing basics. This tool provides a framework or "skeleton" for marketers to use as a template for their plans. The plan runs through prioritizing objectives and articulating your business goals to customers.

  6. What is Business-to-Business (B2B)? Types and Examples

    Types and Examples. Business-to-business (B2B) refers to the transactions that take place between two businesses. In other words, it is the exchange of products, services, or information between companies rather than between a company and a consumer. B2B transactions are typically larger and more complex than B2C transactions, and they involve ...

  7. Your B2B Marketing Plan for 2024 (incl. Template)

    B2B marketing plan template. After following the steps above, you should have most of the information needed to create your 2024 B2B marketing plan. This checklist will help you create a usable document: Success starts with a strong marketing plan. Creating a winning B2B marketing plan for 2024 is the key to growing your business in the new year.

  8. Highly Effective Business Plan Template For B2B Startups

    A business plan template is the secret behind starting a successful B2B company. It serves several purposes if you plan to create a startup. A well-planned business plan will help you convince investors or lenders to finance your business. Startup business plan templates act as a step-by-step guide to building your startup and get concrete ...

  9. B2B Company Marketing Plan Template

    By utilizing the B2B Company Marketing Plan Template in ClickUp and following the steps outlined below, you can develop a strategic and effective marketing plan that will help you achieve your business goals. 1. Define your target audience. To start, it's important to clearly define your target audience. Understand who your ideal B2B customers ...

  10. Free B2B marketing plan template (+ tips and best practices)

    The free B2B marketing plan template above is based on the principles of account-based marketing. Account-based marketing takes the traditional B2B sales and marketing funnel and turns it on its head by going after "qualified" leads rather than letting them filter themselves.

  11. B2B Marketing Business Plan

    The processes involved in B2B marketing allow establishments and organizations to get a wider market reach and bigger lead generation. A B2B marketing plan can help you a lot if you want to ensure that all your action plans, strategies, and tactics are aligned with your vision. Financial Advisor Marketing Plan Examples - PDF.

  12. How to Create a B2B Sales Plan: Template + Examples

    A sales plan is an essential tool for any business, especially in B2B. It provides a roadmap for achieving your sales goals. By clearly outlining your strategies and tactics, a well-crafted sales plan will keep you on track and help you measure your progress along the way. Creating a sales plan can seem daunting, but it doesn't have to be.

  13. How to Build a Strong Operations Strategy for Your B2B Company

    When creating your B2B ops strategy, take time to assess how well you are: Running a data-driven operation with high data integrity and reliability. Basing decisions on facts and figures rather than hunches and gut feel. Creating regular reports and sharing them with all stakeholders. 7.

  14. How to Create an Effective B2B Marketing Plan in 2024

    A B2B marketing plan is a strategic roadmap that outlines the steps a business will take to promote its products or services to other companies. Unlike business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing, business-to-business (B2B) marketing targets a specific audience of decision-makers within organizations.

  15. How to Create a Winning B2B Sales Plan [+ Free Template]

    6. Sales goals (short/long-term) It's also important to include a goals section in this plan. Challenges your team faces, listed in the section above, focus on things that are out of your team's control. Goals, while still challenging, deal with things that your sales team can control.

  16. B2B Marketing Strategies: Examples & Best Practices For 2021

    B2B marketing strategies are a plan that is developed by a business selling to another business looking to drive results by influencing their potential customers. It's the strategic direction that leads to the tactics that will be implemented in the coming months to achieve objectives that align with the overarching business goals ...

  17. The Ultimate Guide to B2B Marketing Strategies 2021

    How to organize a B2B marketing plan. You can organize a B2B marketing plan in many ways, depending on your goals and what you want to achieve. Understanding the B2B marketing funnel is one way to create a clear and solid B2B marketing plan. The B2B marketing funnel maps the buyer's journey from prospect to customer, using various channels and messaging along the way until the prospect converts.

  18. B2B Marketing Strategies: Top 19 Strategies & Examples

    Marketing a B2B business is a complicated job — and, with it, comes a whole new set of challenges.. Today, the B2B buying process has almost completely gone digital with two-thirds of buyers saying they prefer remote and self-service interactions over in-person ones. As a result, marketers have to cut through the noise of an overcrowded market, figure out innovative ways to drive better ...

  19. The ultimate guide to writing a B2B business proposal

    1. Title page - Here goes your company's name, logo, and contact details as well as date and the name of the company the proposal is addressed to. It looks neat and properly organised.|. 2. Cover letter - This is optional. Generally, it applies if you haven't met the prospect before.

  20. B2B Marketing Plan Template

    B2B (business-to-business) marketing is geared towards organizations or companies rather than individual consumers. Because it's geared towards an entirely different audience, B2B marketing strategies differ from B2C (business-to-consumer) marketing. ... Use our B2B marketing plan example as a guide for creating your presentation: No items ...

  21. 6 Real-Life Target Audience Examples to Help You Define Your Own

    Your business plan, content marketing strategy, professional experience and prior knowledge of your target customers will lay the foundation for your research. Compile all of your existing intelligence on your target market, and look for opportunities to learn more about it. ... 3 B2B Target Audience Examples (Keep in mind the following custom ...

  22. How to Create a B2B Sales Plan (Steps, Tips & More)

    4 Steps to Create a Sales Plan in B2B. Sales planning generally includes those aspects of the sales strategy that deal with organizing prospects and coordinating the sales team, including account segmentation and scoring, sales quota planning, territory planning, and sales capacity planning.

  23. 7 Business Plan Examples to Inspire Your Own (2024)

    The business plan examples in this article follow this example template: Executive summary. An introductory overview of your business. Company description. A more in-depth and detailed description of your business and why it exists. Market analysis. Research-based information about the industry and your target market.

  24. Digital Marketing Agency

    An example of B2B would be as between a wholesaler and a retailer or as between a manufacturer and a wholesaler. Unlike Business-to-Consumer (B2C) transactions, B2B deals often involve larger order quantities and more complex negotiations. B2B Examples in e-Commerce. B2B (business-to-business) e-commerce plays a pivotal role in the modern ...

  25. SCORE Building Your Business Plan

    Designed for anyone who has done their business research, most of their marketing plan, and understands some basic accounting and finance. It explains the purposes and value of a plan and uses a content template to help determine what goes into each section of this plan. FREE! A $35 value! Our Presenters Doug Ware and Richard Kingdon With a 40-year career in the power generation business at ...