B2B Sales System — What is It, How Does It Work

How Does the B2B Sales System Work?

A B2B sales system automates the cooperation of suppliers and buyers, enabling both to optimize operating costs. Let's look at what a B2B sales system is and what its operating principles are taking as an example the AGORAB2B platform.

What is the B2B Sales System?

B2B sales system is an automation of the company's interaction with wholesale and retail customers. It allows:

to increase the efficiency of managers' work;
to absolve the staff of routine tasks;
to optimize the company's operating costs.

The company AGORAB2B has developed a B2B system for businesses operating within e-commerce. All the activities related to customer service, starting from the first call and up to concluding a deal, can be carried out through AGORAB2B's B2B system, the B2B portal.

To operate within a B2B system, you should integrate the catalog of products or services with the accounting system and register accounts of the supplier and contractors. Next, you should train your staff. After these steps, you can start working with the system.

You can set up an algorithm of employees' actions. The B2B system provides comments on every step, keeps all the information about interactions with customers, generates reports, helps to keep financial affairs and document flow. Also, it allows you to analyze all sales processes.

That principle is used by the B2B portal AgoraB2B.com, and is designed to trade within the e-commerce market.

What is B2B Sales?

B2B sales is a set of actions to organize trade within the environment of wholesalers, large companies operating in the B2B market. The sales subjects in this area are suppliers (wholesale companies and their sales managers) and buyers (wholesale companies and their procurement managers). The same company can act as a buyer in one segment and as a supplier in another. Buyers in B2B usually fall into the following categories:

industrial enterprises that purchase raw materials for manufacturing products and primarily focus on quality;
government and municipal institutions and organizations that are usually focused on price;
dealers, distributors, resellers, and other retailers who also primarily focus on price.

Sales objects are goods or services that are sold by the vendor. These can be:

finished products (for example, Michelin tires, which are sold by distributors and dealers through the B2B portal, or tires and rims, which are sold through the B2C marketplace by the company Za rulem);
raw materials for manufacturing food products (for example, food processing material supplier Hubstock uses the AGORAB2B Marketplace to buy ingredients);
equipment and devices, stationery, and office goods (online cash registers and accessories of Evotor are sold through the B2B portal to over 2,000 partners without the assistance of the company's managers);
food products (for example, food company "Limak" makes purchases through the electronic bidding system);
wholesale packaging of products for further retail sales or providing installation and assembly services for finished products (particularly, the yeast manufacturer Lesaffre manages the wholesale supply of its products through a B2B wholesale portal);
commercial real estate (sale or lease).

The goals of b2b customers are the promotion and profit of the company. Purchasers pay attention to price, quality, time, reliability, and terms of delivery. Special conditions like volume or frequency of delivery, can often be decisive in choosing a supplier.

A company's purchasing strategy is normally focused either on the value of the product (product quality) or on the cost of the product. The task of a B2B sales company is to identify customer needs or problems and provide solutions.

Features of business in B2B:

few customers (compared to retail);
goods are purchased in large, medium, and small batches;
goods are purchased in frequent iterations;
purchasing managers do not need detailed product descriptions, because they know the selected products;
demand is inelastic and depends on macroeconomic conditions;
several specialists make purchasing decisions;
a long-term, confidential relationship is built between the supplier and the buyer.

These business features contribute to the development of a non-traditional B2B sales channel, B2B sales systems. Systems like AGORAB2B's B2B portal allow suppliers to be flexible in responding to market requirements and successfully solve buyers' problems.

How does the B2B system work?

The B2B portal allows you to quickly import data from price lists and catalogs, connect supplier accounting systems and display the availability of goods in stock. Next, you will need to register accounts for sales managers and purchasing managers of the client company. After these steps, you will be able to set up:

customer categories;
personal discount coefficients, individual prices, and price lists;
individual display of items: different assortment of goods and type of catalog for different customers;
different accounting units of goods and minimum batches for different customers;
personalized promotions;
personalized currency;
different access permissions for managers of different levels;
individual terms of payment, delivery, etc.

By implementing a B2B portal in your company you will optimize collaboration with wholesale customers and speed up their services.

The B2B sales system: principles

B2B portal will help to implement an algorithm considering the experience of many procurement and sales managers working in B2B e-commerce, the knowledge of AGORAB2B experts, and specialists of AGORAB2B collaborating companies.

After downloading the supplier's catalog or price lists, you can connect warehouse accounting systems to the B2B portal. The buyer gets real-time access to this data and can order available items.

The entire sales process, along with customer consulting, splitting an order into batches or vice versa, combining multiple orders into a single one, invoicing, payment, and EDI can be carried out within the B2B portal.

The benefits of a B2B portal are the opportunity to analyze sales data and to use a variety of B2B internet marketing tools depending on the results. B2B portal extends your marketing management capabilities within the B2B sales system. Its tools allow you to:

send special offers to customers who have abandoned their carts or haven't logged in for a long time;
remind sales managers to call or write to such customers;
offer personalized promotions, discounts, or bonus items to individual customers;
promote unmarketable items through additional discounts or offers to bundle such items with related products;
send email notifications to customers to motivate them to make a purchase;
offer additional discounts to increase order volume and raise the check.

Summary

B2B sales system is an opportunity to improve company performance by automating managers' work and using their resources to increase B2B sales. With the AGORAB2B B2B portal, you will absolve your staff from the routine tasks, speed up customer servicing, reduce errors by removing the human factor, and be will be able to analyze sales and focus maximum efforts on effective marketing.