When B2B customers purchase goods online, there’s a lot of thought that goes into their purchase decision. Just one poorly targeted sales or marketing campaign could deter them from signing on the dotted line.
A sales funnel outlines key stages in the buyer’s journey. By understanding the frame of mind a buyer is in at each stage, both marketing and sales teams can deliver the right message at the right time, and improve overall conversion rates.
In this post, we’ll go over what a B2B sales funnel looks like, as well as how to use that model to personalize your marketing strategy and guide new leads toward making a purchase.
The B2B sales funnel is a process all buyers move through when making purchasing decisions on behalf of a company. Often referred to as a sales pipeline, it’s a visual representation of how prospective customers navigate through the buyer’s journey.
Your goal is to move leads through the funnel as quickly and efficiently as possible, while toeing the line between allowing a completely hands-off experience and overwhelming the buyer—both of which can deter them from converting. The less time prospective buyers spend in the B2B sales funnel, the more profit your company will generate.
Buyers pass through the same stages whether they’re buying on behalf of themselves or a business. The two share some similarities, like the sheer volume of channels they interact with throughout the sales journey.
That said, the biggest differences between B2B and B2C sales funnels include:
Take it from Will Stewart, owner of Cedar Spring Recreation, who says: “For us, B2B ecommerce is a longer and more traditional sales cycle and needs more resources upfront to work effectively.
“For example, B2C sales may require some social proof and enough trust for a customer to make an initial purchase, whereas our B2B customers may need to see or try our products, and then need to have more extensive product information for their sales teams to be able to effectively sell our products on their own.”
The B2B sales funnel can vary from industry to industry. Buyers can also jump from one stage to the next, especially if they discover content sooner than expected, or if the need to purchase becomes urgent.
However, we can break down the typical B2B sales funnel into five key stages:
When a business buyer is aware of a problem they’d like to solve, they enter the top of the sales funnel (TOFU). At this point, buyers aren’t necessarily looking for a solution—they’re simply aware of a pain point.
Attract leads at this stage of the B2B sales funnel with content such as:
Once a buyer demonstrates an interest in solving the problem, they progress into the next stage of the B2B sales funnel. This is where they discover products likely to solve their problem, or brainstorm a list of necessary features their next purchase needs to include.
At this point, B2B buyers haven’t identified any suppliers yet. They’re likely browsing content such as:
Business buyers reach the consideration stage when they’re actively searching for a supplier to solve their problem. They’re likely shopping around for the best deal, shortlisting necessary features, and preparing to present their shortlist to stakeholders internally.
Popular activities during this stage include:
Buyers with a shortlist of potential suppliers reach the evaluation stage. At this point, they’ve chosen several suppliers with the ability to solve their problem. Your job is to convince key stakeholders in the B2B buying process that you’re the best company for the job.
The following content can support this:
Cycling retailer Ceramic Speed, for example, makes this content easy for B2B buyers to access through their Shopify-powered B2B storefront:
Once businesses have sign-off from key stakeholders in their organization, they choose a supplier and make their purchase. This concludes the journey through the B2B sales funnel.
We know the B2B sales funnel has many stages a lead needs to pass through before becoming a paying customer. The real question is, how can you guide potential B2B customers through the process without draining your resources—or worse, being too pushy and causing them to abandon a purchase?
Lack of clarity on the definition of a “qualified lead” can lead to marketers misunderstanding a prospective buyer’s stage in the funnel. This causes confusion in the experience that leads get when they’re handed over to sales. Sales teams may jump the gun and try to sell to prospective customers when they’re not yet receptive to those bottom-funnel messages.
When both departments are aligned, however, marketers can easily identify leads that are progressing through the B2B sales funnel, and tailor their outreach accordingly. Fewer unqualified leads means less pipeline clutter and more opportunities for sales reps to focus on the potential clients that are most likely to convert.
So how do you get both teams on the same page? It starts with a documented ideal customer profile (ICP) that identifies your buyer’s demographic and psychographic traits, such as their pain points, company size, annual revenue, or purchase motivation. Pair this with a detailed customer journey map that pinpoints key touchpoints throughout the funnel—so both teams can highlight which leads are lingering where.
Bear in mind that your customer journey and ICP may evolve over time as your product line expands and the market shifts. Schedule regular check-ins with both departments to pinpoint any trends or changes to buyer behavior that influence how people flow through the sales funnel.
To know where a lead sits in the B2B sales funnel, you’ll need data. Yet many teams are confused because siloed data and inconsistent collection procedures wreak havoc on data quality. Website analytics data sits in one tool; recorded interactions between the buyer and a sales rep live in another. This makes it difficult to get the big-picture view of each customer, while also hindering rep productivity and contributing to technical debt.
Lack of real-time data synchronization also makes it difficult to offer the personalized experiences that modern B2B buyers demand. You might think that a buyer is in the consideration stage after they’ve opened your email campaign, but data from your customer relationship management (CRM) system hasn’t updated in real time. You reach out with a request to book a call when they’ve already got one scheduled.
Shopify solves this by unifying product, order, and customer data natively in one platform—no patchy middleware or integrations required. The approach has been proven to lower total cost of ownership by as much as 36%.
“Publishing a product or updating product details shows up on the web for customers to see, in our customer service team’s UI, and in the point of sale,” says Kyle Tuttle, director of technical products at Simon Pearce. “It’s one update that hits all channels, which gives the team more confidence about where a product can be found, whether it’s in a specific store or warehouse or anywhere else.”
To give the right support to a potential customer, first identify what stage of the B2B sales funnel they’re currently in.
As Clare Holden, founder of White Night, explains, “A buyer for a multi-brand store will generally never place an order with a brand they haven’t stocked before having seen the product in person. It is too risky for them. They are not just buying one piece, but various styles and sizes, so it is generally essential to participate in a showroom or a trade show so buyers can see the product in person.
“At tradeshows, the buyers are generally under a tight schedule. This is probably the biggest clue as to what stage the buyer is at. If they are really interested, they will make time for you. If they come and have a look, you may be on their radar but they are not willing to place an order yet. They might be waiting to see how you sell and grow without making a commitment.”
The advantage of taking your B2B business online is that you have greater visibility over the touchpoints a potential buyer is having with your company. Get insight into:
Compile this insight with a B2B lead-nurturing tool like Leadfeeder or ZoomInfo, which willll tie website activity to a potential customer even if the company hasn’t yet created a wholesale account, so you can accurately forecast your B2B sales pipeline and recognize qualified leads.
The traditional way of selling to business customers involved lots of cold calling, trade shows, and manual invoicing. But experts predict 80% of B2B sales will be generated digitally by the end of 2025—up from just 13% in 2019. And B2B customers are comfortable enough to place orders of up to $500,000 online.
Employing a unified B2B commerce platform to take your B2B business online can be a strong value proposition. Take it from HVAC retailer Carrier, who launched their wholesale website in just 30 days with Shopify, compared to 9–12 months on their previous platform. Costs also significantly diminished to just $100,000 per website, versus upwards of $2 million with their previous infrastructure.
“If you want lower TCO, rapid deployment, and a platform that is growing at a rate faster than you can develop it yourself, then I would encourage you to look at Shopify,” says Carrier’s associate director of ecommerce Steve Duran.
Shopify’s B2B ecommerce platform allows you to do the following, all from the same back end that powers your B2C storefront:
“We now have customers willing to place $50,000+ orders online on their own with minimal to no hand-holding by reps,” says Michael Martocci, founder of SwagUp. “If you can get large B2B AOVs with low sales overhead, you can build a pretty profitable business.”
Once you’ve identified the stage of the sales process a prospect is lingering in, try to divert them to your online store. This can be tricky, however, if buyers entered the awareness or consideration stage through an offline channel, such as a tradeshow.
The secret is to provide an incentive—be that a free sample, discount on their first order, or promise of speedy delivery, since manual fulfillment processes don’t slow you down.
Kelly Van Arsdale, cofounder and CEO of Spinnaker Chocolate, says, “We typically start by cold emailing prospective customers. We have a pretty good idea of who we think will be interested, given the price point of our product. If they’re interested, we send them a few samples of our chocolate and follow up a week or so later.
“If they are excited about the samples, we share access to an online page with our wholesale pricing and process,” Kelly says. “Assuming they’re still interested, we ask them to fill out a quick form and then send an activation email to our password-protected online wholesale store, where they can place orders for our wholesale-specific products.”
Digital marketing campaigns can resolve the queries a prospective customer has as they pass through each stage of the B2B sales funnel.
This is where a personalized approach to B2B sales pays off, since the type of content a buyer is most likely to engage with differs depending on the stage of the funnel they’re currently in.
We can break this down into three main categories:
Tip: Don’t expect prospective buyers to discover this content on their own. Use Shopify Flow’s ecommerce automation functionality to proactively provide content to customers based on the actions they take.
If a B2B buyer views your landing page, for example, create a workflow that sends a relevant case study five days later. Or, two weeks after creating a company profile, automatically schedule a welcome email that introduces the B2B sales representative they can reach out to should they have any questions.
“The more you automate with tools like Flow, the more money a business can make,” says Julio Giannotti, web manager at Scandinavian Designs. “It’s allowed us to run three Shopify stores without hiring an employee for each one.”
Despite the fact that three-quarters of B2B buyers prefer to not interact with sales reps during their shopping experience, Gartner found those buyers are more likely to experience purchase regret. Rep-assisted buyers cut this regret in half.
Strike the right balance by prioritizing self-service experiences through your online store, but never making human support too far away. Employ a B2B sales team to support leads’ decision-making, should they require extra help. This could include:
Take it from Ian Leslie, chief marketing officer at Industry West, who says: “I can’t tell you the number of times we’ve had customers log in to their trade account to see their discount, add $10,000 worth of product into their cart, then send a screenshot to a sales rep to get a formal quote,” he says. “You’re like, okay, the quote is what you got in your cart with that discount. But they still have to have that formal process.”
Note that not every interaction needs to be a sales pitch. The aim is to uncover the hurdle that’s preventing a buyer from progressing to the next stage of the sales funnel, and resolving it—subtly communicating how your product makes that possible.
But for outreach to result in a conversion, content must be consistent across all channels: per the same Gartner report, B2B buyers are 2.8 times more likely to complete a high-quality deal when they view consistent information between a vendor’s website and their representatives.
Customer relationship management (CRM) tools like HubSpot, Reamaze, and Endear integrate with Shopify, so you can easily reference previous interactions with each potential customer. It’ll help fine-tune future communication and deliver the content a customer needs, without forcing them to ask twice—even if they’re speaking with a different salesperson each time.
Many B2B brands are relying on generative AI to identify leads and speed up the journey through the B2B sales funnel. Supporting this trend, McKinsey’s recent report concludes that generative AI can “enhance profitable B2B sales growth.”
Interestingly, buyers are open to AI’s involvement in their purchasing decisions. The same report found that 19% of stakeholders are already implementing generative AI for B2B buying and selling. Another 23% are in the process of doing so.
Yet with so many AI tools released into the market (and some buyers still requiring human interaction throughout the B2B sales funnel), it can be difficult to decipher when to—and when not to—rely on AI.
McKinsey shares some examples on how this is evolving:
Tip: Choose from hundreds of prebuilt workflows with the Shopify Flow app. Or, create your own custom trigger-based automations across the entire Shopify ecosystem.
The B2B sales funnel doesn’t conclude when a buyer has made their first purchase. Get the first interaction right and there’s a good chance your B2B customers will return to buy again. It’s these repeat customers that drive 44% of a company’s revenue.
Encourage customer retention by building strong relationships with B2B buyers. Again, most of this can be automated:
“B2C is mostly reliant on direct response ads and social media content,” says Meredith Erin, CEO of Boredwalk. “B2B is more about relationships between the sales team and buyers at retail stores. We have a sales team who builds and nurtures those relationships.”
By taking your B2B business online, customers can self-serve and absorb content on their own terms. Automate as much of the process as possible, proactively delivering useful information based on the actions they’ve completed.
Buyers who feel confident in making their first purchase will do so sooner. Not only does that impact your bottom line, it frees up time for sales representatives to spend on higher-value deals and prospects that need hand-holding through the decision process.
“Shopify has completely changed the way we do business,” says Finn Christensen, digital marketing coordinator at Darche. “Previously, our B2B orders were mainly processed manually. Retailers would email or call to place orders, and our customer service team would assist them.
“Now, retailers feel comfortable placing orders online via the Shopify B2B function. This provides them with an easier, more seamless sales experience, and helps build trust with our brand. We’re now a more modern business.”
Need help processing B2B sales online? With decades of combined experience selling to B2B customers, Shopify is here to help.
The B2B sales process shows the stages that buyers pass through on their journey to becoming a paying customer. This includes prospecting, lead qualification, contact, proposal, negotiation, and signing the contract.
The five stages of the B2B sales funnel are:
The main difference is that a sales funnel outlines the steps a buyer takes before making a purchase, while a marketing funnel is about delivering content that supports each stage of the buyer journey.
