You’re wrong to assume that you can run a B2B company in the same way as a B2C one. When other businesses are your target market, new concerns and issues arise that never affect business-to-consumer businesses. If you’re venturing into this market for the first time - or expanding your business to go B2B - then you need to be aware of the biggest barriers that might block your way.
As stated, the B2B marketplace offers unique concerns, and these tend to be the top three:
1. Invoicing Issues
The way customers pay for your products/services differs dramatically when you switch from B2C to B2B. With the former, you typically list things for a price and receive the payment right away. Looking at the latter, you’re mainly dealing with invoices and delayed payments. There’s a particularly large wave of business customers who wish to follow a BNPL (Buy Now Pay Later) approach. They need what you sell, but they may lack the cash to buy it right now. What typically happens is they purchase your goods, you send them an invoice, and then they pay later when they have the money (which they usually get because of your goods).
It makes things extremely complicated on your end as you’re constantly managing invoices and chasing delayed payments. This eats into your cash flow, which is why you need to educate yourself on B2B BNPL and the ideal ways to get paid without suffering. Life is definitely easier when you run a B2C business and can just list products on a site and receive the money.
2. Building Trust
You can argue that building trust is a problem for B2C businesses as well, but it gets elevated when you move into the B2B world. The reason is quite straightforward: business customers/clients will usually be looking to secure long-term partnerships with your business. You aren’t dealing with many one-off transactions; a company will likely buy from you and then stick with your products/services for a long time because it makes it easier to run their business.
As a result, you must establish a high-degree of trust to secure these long-term value clients. They will do more research than a typical consumer, and you have to push the boat out further to truly stand out as a trustworthy supplier for businesses. If you can’t build this level of trust, you can’t operate successfully in the B2B field.
3. Price Negotiations
Going back to the price of your goods/services, B2B companies are in a strange position where they don’t always provide a price for things. It’s usually a case of dishing out quotes to business customers when they enquire - and this also means you deal with price negotiations.
You must get good at negotiating contracts and prices for each business customer, ensuring that they’re happy with what they pay, yet you still make a profit. It’s a unique complexity that doesn’t happen in the B2C world, where prices are usually set beforehand with no wiggle room.
These three concerns should already demonstrate how different the B2B and B2C markets are, meaning you can’t rely on the same tactics that worked on general consumers. If you want to separate your successful business from the rest, you need to tackle the biggest worries and make them things you no longer need to worry about.
