B2B and Food Service effective Sales and Marketing

Welcome to the topic I am sharing my experience and learning about “B2B or Food Service Sales and Marketing

I've been working with B2B business over 8 years, and I've found that this topic still confounds them let’s talk about Best Practices for B2B Marketers

Building a growth system for a B2B business. If you are a business to business marketer, you are a business that sells to a businesses, then it's likely that there are some different ideas, different channels, different tactics that you're going to use to build your growth system.

First and foremost, and you've probably discovered this already it's primarily about channel selection. There are certain channels that are going to be more potent for B2B.

Business buyers, business prospects hang out in certain places where they might not hang out if you were trying to get that mom who is going to invest in some new toy that you were selling. So, it's important that you choose the right channels but then also understand what's important inside of those channels. So, for example,

Listing Channel for B2B-Food Service, you can think for your few more

1)   Referral Marketing and Sales

2)   Influencer marketing and Sales (Chef/ Food Service consultant/ Purchase manager etc.)

3)   Offline and Online Event

4)   Speaking Engagement

5)   Community Building

6)   Physical Reach (Hotels/ SAR/QAR/Caterer/Food Industry/Push wholesale etc.) etc.  

If we're going to talk about the channel of social media, there's no question that LinkedIn is a great channel for B2B buyers. That's where people go to do business, to network, to learn about opportunities that are there.

A whole different message and certainly responding to a whole different type of tactical approach so it's important that you understand of course, the ideal client and where they hang out. And that is going to actually help dictate some of your channel selection if you sell in a B2B environment.

Additionally, the journey is very important in the B2B environment. Business to business buyers quite often have a buying process that is much different than a B2C buyer.

They might do research, then they'll have a team of people that need to come together to analyze options. They might start looking at pricing models or business models, so there's a lot more hand holding and guiding that actually has to be addressed in B2B tactics and in B2B channels.

Content is certainly the tool that drives that journey. And not just great content, a whole bunch of content, but content that is designed to create awareness and then trust and then education, and then conversion, and then perhaps referral. So content that has very specific intention is how you use content or the content channel to drive people, or to guide that journey that is so important in B2B environments.

And finally, authority plays a great role in the B2B buyer decision. Being seen as a thought leader, as a brand leader, as an expert in your industry is going to give you a leg up when it comes to considering to buy from you, considering why you charge a premium for what you do, and these are going to be great considerations in the channels and the tactics that you take. 

So these are some of the considerations again, all of the things, what channels you get into, finding your core channel, creating a project/product list, these are all still true but consider these nuances as they apply to the B2B buyer.