Sales Enablement for businesses that serve customers (B2C) and other businesses (B2B) is in principle the same. It is built around three pillars:

1. Super-powering the sales representative with appropriate, adequate and timely content;
2. Enabling them to elevate their game with quick-to-retrieve information for answering questions; and
3. Training them to anticipate different experiences and objections on the field by extensive training that suits their convenience.
   

To some extent, B2B sales is becoming like B2C sales - customers are more comfortable making purchases online. A McKinsey study found that 97% of buyers find it acceptable to spend $50,000 online; of whom nearly 15% would not hesitate to spend up to $1 million. However, there are still some subtle differences between B2B and B2C sales approaches which need to be addressed. Knowing these nuances is critical to designing, training, and creating collateral that is useful to the sales person on the field. This table lays out the key differences, which are explained further in the article -

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Expectations

Every B2B customer is looking for help to solve their business challenge, especially in sectors like IT Services, medical technology, hardware virtualization, education technology (targeted at schools, colleges & universities) and commercial vehicles. They therefore expect that the sales representative will have spent significant time understanding their specific problems, and not present a generic solution.

On the other hand, B2C customers are looking to balance a personal or family need with their budgets. They are happier to adopt something ready-made as long as it suits most of their needs, rather than insisting on something bespoke. The presales meeting therefore requires comparatively less preparation on part of the representative.

Ticket Size, Sales Cycle & Number of Customers

B2B price points are usually higher than B2C. It is one reason B2B customers take time evaluating before deciding. Contrast that with the price points of B2C products that may range from very low to very high. Retail buyers will buy lower price products like apparels or general insurance policy, fairly quickly, as opposed to purchasing higher value products like a car or a home, when they seek more information and evaluate reviews. 

The sales cycle is longer and more complex for most B2B products, which are often more complex than B2C products. There are multiple meetings spread over weeks, often months. They often involve multiple stakeholders from the customer’s side, and senior executives from the product side as well. B2B sales representatives need more tools, such as flyers and FAQs. They need to know all stages of the sales process, and interface with other departments to create product demos.

On the other hand, B2C sales sees the representative deal with fewer stakeholders per sale, and the sales cycle is much shorter, days if not hours. They encounter a larger variety of sales situations as they meet many more customers. They are expected to answer queries faster than in B2B, and must know the market landscape better.

Products, Customization and Competitors

B2C organizations like insurance companies, mutual funds or automoblie dealers have a wide range of products. The sales representative needs to know not only their salient features, but their competitors as well. Opportunities for customizing the product itself are fewer. On the other hand, B2B organizations, like IT solutions providers, often have one complex product that can be customized for each client’s need. Since they operate in a business niche, they have fewer competitors.

For a sales representative, the training needs are qualitatively different. They also need different strategies for CRM, customer-facing collateral, communication skills, and importantly, analytics. 

Number of Stakeholders

A B2C sale rarely involves anyone more than an individual, such as a student evaluating a laptop. In other sectors, such as automobiles, the buyer’s family has a say in the process. The seller is therefore looking at verbal and non-verbal cues from them, and has the leverage to shift their pitch between the purely transactional (solving a problem) to the aspirational (meeting an emotional need).

In B2B sales, it is rare that the direct beneficiary (say, the sales head buying a CRM product) takes the decision alone. They often have to consult relevant stakeholders from various business functions and get approvals from the CXOs. Each stakeholder has different questions that the sales team needs to answer satisfactorily. Sales Enablement is therefore challenged to process each requirement in parallel.

Sales Collateral

We have argued previously that sales collateral is the seller’s biggest ally. In B2C marketing, often the product is simple enough that the collateral made by the marketing department needs minimal explanation. The seller may only have to add a few quick customizations and back-of-the-envelope calculations to explain the benefits, as in insurance.

On the other hand, B2B marketing requires more technical, product-specific collateral, at each step of the sales cycle. Different stakeholders want different kinds of information, often in a format that they can refer to multiple times (such as a flyer or a presentation). In B2B sales therefore, the Sales Enablement team needs to play a larger role in creating this targeted content, than leaving it to the sales operations teams.

Nevertheless, the similarities are high. Both B2C and B2B Sales Enablement deploy similar learning technology to help sellers achieve their target. Both need to take the sales force along, and have analytics to evaluate every representative and every conversation. Increasingly, many subscription-based B2B models include an initial registration on the website, followed by many meetings, which may happen over a chat interface without a personal meeting, before the final product is sold. Even in such faceless encounters, Sales Enablement is helpful in training sellers for the right pitch and to handle customer queries or complaints. Whether B2B or B2C, success in Sales Enablement is simple - understand the pulse of the customer, and train your salesforce to personalize their pitches to sell better. 

sharpsell equips sales reps with personalized content to engage with customers and customized presentations to share with customers as per their needs. All the content is accessible through a single source - the sharpsell platform. Companies using sharpsell have seen an increase in sales productivity with higher number of products sold, higher ticket size, increased visibility on prospecting, reduced content creation cost, reduced time to first sale, reduced costs of training, and uncovering insights on product feedback.