Approach Your B2B Sales Launch Like Another Startup: 5 Tips to Accelerate Growth

Launching a B2B department is a turning point for many B2C tech companies. However, such an expansion brings many strategic misperceptions and challenges. The first and foremost rule to succeed is to treat the creation of a B2B department like a startup, even if you aren’t introducing a new product. 

The difference between B2B and B2C approaches is quite evident regarding sales. In terms of strategy, many companies that launch a B2B department after years of successful B2C performance still fall into the trap of extrapolating the previous experience. And this may become the biggest obstacle to a good start. 

I will share the five tips for a successful B2B launch and fallacies to avoid at each stage. I defined these principles during the B2B department launch at Headway, a Ukrainian EdTech startup, in March 2022. Owing to this startup-inspired strategy, we managed to boost revenue growth x7 despite the low summer season and the war. 

1. Ideating: inspect your product first, don’t skip the problem/solution stage

The B2B launch needs unique answers to what, why, to whom, and how. These may dramatically influence the existing product, its positioning, and the overall roadmap of the market entry. You may assume that you’ve refined your product and dive deep into all the past findings to lay the foundation for future B2B growth. What you should do, however, is ignore almost all the B2C learnings. 

This first stage is an essential prerequisite to market research. To find the right product-market fit, the primary subject of your investigation should not be the market but your product through the eyes of the audience.

What we did: We talked with 100+ companies from different markets and niches. During personal interviews, we had two primary focuses: what problems potential customers were having and what modification of the product would make the biggest positive impact in that field. In two months, we developed a dashboard with the ICPs and product features clients needed, which helped us identify crucial pre-launch changes, prioritize the next steps of product development, and create a proper basis for further market research. 

2. Concepting: prioritize areas for market research by snooping on your competitors

Market research is an obvious prerequisite to entering a new niche and tailoring value propositions. However, how to approach the research and deal with the findings are the critical steps where many fail. Challenges arise when you create the framework for the research. Consider that you compete with businesses from many other niches except your own, your core geographies vary from the B2C scene, and the B2B performance is not limited to product sales, as you may also rely on partnerships for revenue. The research approach is critical because your final users and stakeholders have different pain points. Also, product positioning may differ but not contrast with the one you have for B2C.

What we do: We keep abreast of Crunchbase and Dealroom to check updates from our business environment, reconsider value propositions and formulate hypotheses for subsequent outbound campaign testing. The landscape for investigations may seem limitless. But don’t let your strive to stand out from competitors keep you away from the valuable insights they already have. Some of their cases may help you skip your own long-running tests. Having a broad picture is critical: we keep abreast not only of education apps but all products that boost employee wellbeing and growth, from sports to time management and awareness.

3. Commitment: don’t mess with people and processes

In many cases, B2B brings the need to switch to a sales-led or hybrid approach to growth in contrast to product-based, which is typical for B2C software. Thus, the B2B performance largely depends on the right team and accurately chosen key roles. For two reasons, many businesses need to pay more attention to processes at this stage: roles can get blurred due to a lack of human resources, and the final agenda may dramatically differ from what it is expected to be afterward. Workflow clarity is crucial during the B2B launch, as the share of outbound leads is predominant, and the closing deal period usually spans three to four months. 

What we did: From the onset, we clarified responsibilities, synchronizing roles with core sales funnel stages. A solution that worked for Headway's sales team was adding a Sales Development Representative to search and qualify leads, make the first touch, and then pass the baton to a Sales Manager. Our key processes include: market and ICP updates, database management and contact validation, outbound sequences and funnel distribution development, marketing activities to increase the inbound leads to share, hot leads processing, and customer success management. Proper task decomposition, alignment, and automation helped our small team of six members close deals for five clients each month, send up to 800 e-mails per sequence, and maintain consistent communication.

4. Validation: identify common denominators for your core goals

Validation is the MVP-testing stage for most startups, and even if your product has been up and running for years, you shouldn’t frame yourself. It's all about balancing product modification with its marketing strategy and coordinating those efforts. To maximize benefits from dozens of simultaneous tests running during launch, create separate dashboards for each business stage and link to a common denominator of the strategic goal. Those early tests may provide you with growth options for years ahead.

What we did: For Headway, we gathered insights on how to market the current version of the app and what updates to implement into the software, eventually expanding the product's marketing potential on the B2B scene. For example, after one month of consistent work, we realized that depending on the size of the company we are targeting, our buying persona is not only a learning and development specialist but also a CEO/COO in smaller businesses. Then we expanded our focus to heads of departments. Our idea is that even a small team using the product may eventually result in further expansion at the company level. This modified approach increased our open rate from 65% to 87% and the reply rate from 12% to 35%, which eventually resulted in +600% revenue growth.

5. Scaling: know your focus, but be omni

There are countless scaling options to test, and all vary in one way or another. But focus is crucial to avoid wrong conclusions when your sample is relatively small.  We concentrated our initial efforts on content marketing and expanding the variety of communication channels. Due to the longer sales cycle and specifics of fact-based decision-making, longer-form content and business use cases take center stage. This issue may be an obstacle when resources are limited, so an omnichannel approach is useful. In B2B sales, the performance of various channels is less predictable, so you need to test all the platforms and processes consistently. 

What we did: As an EdTech startup, we identified the gap in understanding the benefits of corporate learning and started creating content to educate potential customers on the topic. We filled our blog with practical advice on team management: building a solid corporate culture, boosting employee productivity, and negotiating skills. Those articles were also an important component of our performance marketing campaigns, affiliate publications, and SMM strategy because they all add to the core goal of cultivating interest in the product by providing customers with practical value. Additionally, we expanded our use scope by integrating into major learning and management systems. Omnichannel content strategy creates a seamless experience for clients, strengthening each channel and breaking the content-creation limits. 

Approach your B2B department launch like a new startup to accelerate your progress. Using most of your B2C experience as a base may only lead you to the wrong hypotheses that will ultimately fail. Research and testing will consume most of your resources at the initial stages. You will need to find product-market fit, develop ICP, investigate the new niche, define core processes, sales funnel stages, and roles, and start from scratch with marketing and brand development. For a quick start, both flexibility and focus are crucial. Make a lot of tests, align short-term goals with long-term, and be bold and quick when switching from non-working tools to those that maximize your revenue.