Last updated on February 27th, 2025 at 07:26 am
The B2B business model is considered to be superior to the B2C business model when it comes to making money online. Why?
Because companies are more willing to spend money on products and services than individual consumers.
However, reaching decision-makers within those companies can be a challenge, especially considering how busy they are. So how can you put your offer in front of your dream customers?
Here are the five most effective B2B marketing strategies that you can use to grow your business…
Take Time to Understand Your Dream Customers
When you run a B2B business, you need to use not one, but two definitions of who your dream customers are:
- Companies that you are targeting. Get specific about their industry, their niche, their business model, their annual revenue, their valuation, etc.
Once you clearly define these criteria, you will be able to use them to make your marketing more effective. - Decision-makers within those companies. In theory, B2C means selling to consumers and B2B means selling to businesses, but in practice, you are selling your products and services to other people in both cases.
After all, companies are not sentient entities. They don’t make decisions, humans do. So who are the decision-makers within the companies that you are targeting?
Getting clear on that will help you create marketing campaigns that appeal to the people who have the power to purchase your product or service on the company’s behalf.
Something to consider here is that the larger the organization, the more misalignment between the goals of the organization and the goals of the individuals within it you should expect.
Example #1: Solopreneurs
Let’s say that you sell a product or service designed to help solopreneurs grow their bootstrapped SaaS businesses.
In that case, the goals of the organization and the goals of the decision-maker will be perfectly aligned because you are dealing with a one-man or a one-woman show.
The founder will directly benefit from reducing churn, increasing monthly recurring revenue (MRR), improving the profit margins, etc.
So it makes sense to appeal to all that in your sales messaging.
Example #2: International Corporations
Now let’s imagine that you sell a product or service designed to help international corporations streamline some internal processes.
In that case, the goals of the organization and the goals of the decision-maker won’t be perfectly aligned. Why?
Because the decision-maker probably won’t directly benefit from reducing churn, increasing MRR, improving profit margins, etc. unless they are the founder or a C-level executive.
In all likelihood, the decision-maker will be pursuing their own goals within the organization, with the organization’s goals mattering only to the extent of them being instrumental to the decision-maker’s personal goals.
Say, if the decision-maker is the head of marketing at one of the local branches, they probably want to meet their KPIs, look good in front of their boss, get a raise or a promotion, etc. Or they might simply want to eliminate some tedious repetitive task that they hate!
When you are targeting a large organization, you need to figure out what the decision-makers want and appeal to that in your sales messaging, not to the goals of the organization itself that the individuals within it probably don’t care much about.
You also need to consider the organizational structures that you are dealing with because the larger the organization, the more bureaucracy you should expect.
It might be that the decision-maker who has the power to buy your product or service will have to justify the purchase to the higher-ups, so you need to make sure that your sales messaging makes it easy for them to do so.
This is the complexity that you need to be prepared to deal with if you want to grow your B2B business!
Build Your B2B Sales Funnel First
Marketing strategies that we are going to discuss in this article can help you generate traffic. But that’s just the first step!
You will then have to convert that traffic into leads, those leads into customers, and those customers into repeat customers.
We recommend putting a system in place for all that before you start focusing on marketing. Why?
Because it will help you make the most out of the traffic that you generate!
The Value Ladder Sales Funnel
We believe that the most effective way to sell anything online is the Value Ladder sales funnel.
It was created by our co-founder Russell Brunson who then used it to take ClickFunnels from zero to $10M+ in annual revenue in just one year (it’s at $100M+ now!).
This sales funnel has four stages:
- Bait – You offer the potential customer your lead magnet in exchange for their email address.
- Frontend – You offer the potential customer your least expensive and least valuable product or service.
- Middle – You offer the customer a more expensive and more valuable product or service.
- Backend – You offer the customer your most expensive and most valuable product or service.
Ideally, you also offer a continuity program of some sort, meaning, a subscription product that generates recurring revenue.
We also recommend adding downsells, upsells, and cross sells to these core offers in order to maximize your revenue.
The reason why this sales funnel works so well is that it allows you to:
- Start the relationship with that person by offering free value
- Nurture that relationship by continuing to provide free value via email
- Build trust by providing progressively more paid value at each stage
Here’s how Russell explains it:
Also, if the Value Ladder graph above seems overwhelming, don’t worry.
You can start with just a lead magnet and a frontend offer and then build out the rest of your Value Ladder over time.
In fact, you can build a lead generation funnel (the Bait stage) and start growing your email list even if you don’t have anything to sell yet!
Anyway, here are the three Value Ladder sales funnel variations that tend to work extremely well for B2B businesses…
B2B Sales Funnel #1: Survey Funnel
A survey funnel is a funnel that allows you to direct different people to different sales funnels from a single starting point.
It looks like this:
Page 1: A survey
Page 2: A squeeze page based on the survey results
Page 3: A thank you page based on the survey results
Get 22 Sales Funnel Recipes for FREE!
A quote funnel is a variation of the survey funnel where you use a survey to qualify leads and provide them with quotes.
It’s the most straightforward B2B sales funnel because it doesn’t require a lead magnet. You drive traffic to your survey page, visitors answer the survey questions, and you provide them with quotes based on their answers.
Then, if they look like a high-quality lead, you reach out to them to set up a discovery call and pitch your product or service on that call.
Quote Funnel Case Study: Logan Brown
Back in 2016, Universal Waste Disposal Company had a problem: it wasn’t generating any leads online. Literally zero.
One day Logan Brown, who worked there at the time, was approached by his boss, who had an idea.
He was inspired by a recent episode of “The Profit” in which our co-founder Russell explained how sales funnels can be used to grow any kind of business.
Now he wanted Logan to create a sales funnel for their company. “Here’s ClickFunnels. I think you can do this.”
Logan was up for the challenge and immediately got to work. After learning more about the subject he settled on a quote funnel.
Here’s what the first page of that funnel looked like:
After filling out the survey, the potential customer would be shown a pop-up box asking for their contact information:
Then they would be taken to this “Thank You” page:
And then the company would reach out to them and ask what would be a good time to call them. Super simple, right?
This helped the Universal Waste Disposal Company go from zero to 4-7 online submissions per week.
This might not sound that impressive…
Until you realize that in that industry each customer is worth thousands of dollars. In 2017, the company generated $100,000+ in new revenue from these online leads!
B2B Sales Funnel #2: Lead Magnet Funnel
The lead magnet funnel is arguably the most popular B2B lead generation funnel.
Here’s how it looks like:
Page 1: Lead magnet landing page
Page 2: Thank You page
Get 22 Sales Funnel Recipes for FREE!
An ebook funnel is a variation of the lead magnet funnel where you use an ebook as your lead magnet.
It’s a great place to start if you want to master the lead magnet funnel because ebooks are so easy to produce!
Ebook Funnel Case Study: Rob Cuesta
Rob Cuesta owns a publishing company for business professionals.
He tried to get leads by attending various networking events but he would come home frustrated without much to show for it.
In fact, he would often feel that he had wasted time and money, but didn’t get a lot of leads!
Rob then tried to rely on word-of-mouth but that meant waiting around for referrals, which were few and far between.
Eventually, he got so tired of chasing down leads that he started to look for ways to automate the process. That was when he decided to give ClickFunnels a try.
He ended up creating an ebook funnel:
- The potential customer would download a free ebook called “16 Ways To Grow Your Business With a Book”.
- On the “Thank You” page they would be invited to a free webinar called “Your Book Is Your Brand” that provided additional video training.
- After watching the webinar, they would be invited to schedule a free 30-minute strategy call with Rob.
As a result, he collected 320 leads to sell his done-for-you services, with the service pricing being $15-35k.
Rob ended up with so many new clients that he had to hire more people to keep up with the workload!
B2B Sales Funnel #3: Webinar Funnel
A webinar funnel is a lead generation funnel where you use a webinar as your lead magnet.
Here’s what it looks like:
Page 1: A webinar registration page
Page 2: A thank you page
Page 3: A webinar page
Page 4: A product order page
This sales funnel holds a special place in our hearts because Russell used it to get ClickFunnels off the ground during that first year after the launch.
Back then he would aim to do 5-7 webinars a week and sometimes would end up doing 2-3 webinars a day. Pretty crazy but it worked!
And he still swears by it:
“I always tell people that the best business model in the world is to create a webinar selling your product or your service and then do that webinar live every single week for a year at least once a week.”
Webinar Funnel Case Study: Derreck Smallwood
Derreck Smallwood used an automated webinar funnel to sell his marketing service subscription.
Here’s what it looked like:
- The potential customer would register for the webinar
- They would be taken to the webinar page to watch the pre-recorded presentation
- They would then be shown an order form for Derreck’s service
- Finally, they would be offered a special, one-time upsell
What were the results?
Over $130,00 in revenue!
Want to Learn More About Sales Funnels?
Russell has written three best-selling books about online marketing:
His first book, “DotCom Secrets”, is all about building funnels, so if you want to learn more about that, we highly recommend reading it!
Get “DotCom Secrets” for FREE!
The Top 5 B2B Marketing Strategies
Okay, so now you have a sales funnel.
But how can you reach your dream customers?
Here are our top five B2B marketing strategies:
#1 Cold Email
Cold email can be a great way to get your business off the ground, especially if your marketing budget is extremely limited.
It’s a numbers game: if you send 1,000 cold emails, you will probably get at least a few customers.
Of course, you can’t just spam random people and expect it to work, you need to do your research, qualify leads, and then reach out to them with thoughtful, personalized emails. So how should you go about it?
Here’s the approach that Alex Berman, the founder of X27 marketing agency, recommends in his book “The Cold Email Manifesto”:
First, you want to create an alternative domain name for your business. Say, if your business domain name is yourcompany.com, create an alternative domain name such as yourcompany.co.
Then use that alternative domain name to create a new email account. You can use Google Workspace for this or other popular providers such as Fastmail or Protonmail.
The reason for this is that it’s easy to get marked as spam when you are just starting out with cold email and don’t quite know what you are doing. You don’t want to get your main business domain name blacklisted should that happen!
Once you have your new email account, you need to warm it up, which means creating a track record of back-and-forth email messaging with established email accounts. This is important for avoiding spam filters. You can use services such as Lemwarm for this.
Once that’s done, it’s time to build a list of leads. While you can do it yourself, you’d probably be better off outsourcing it to a B2B lead generation expert. You can find freelancers that specialize in this on Fiverr.
Typically, these freelancers offer a spreadsheet based on your lead qualification criteria with company names, job titles, full names, and email addresses.
The number of leads will depend on your agreement with the freelancer but usually you pay for either 100 or 1,000 leads.
Ideally, you want to target the most senior person in the company, so either the founder or the CEO.
Once you have your spreadsheet, it’s time to start your cold email campaign. You don’t need any additional software for that but we recommend using a cold outreach management tool like Lemlist to keep track of everything.
Alex argues that a great cold email consists of five parts:
- Subject line
- Compliment
- Case study
- Call to action
- Email signature
Here’s the exact cold email template that his agency used to generate $600,000 in annual revenue in 30 days and then millions in revenue for both themselves and their clients:
Subject: Quick question
Hi Jackson,
Been following Fuzz for a while and love your work, awesome job with Rockefeller Center!
I specialize in finding new clients for web and app developers. Recently, we helped Dom and Tom, an NYC based developer, bring on McDonald’s and close an extra $1,000,000 in 6 months.
Can you take on more clients at Fuzz? Let me know and I can send over a few times to chat.
Thanks,
Alex
—
Alex Berman, Founder
EXPERIMENT 27
12249 McKinnon Rd, Windermere, FL 34786
Mobile: 9729229823
alex@x27marketing.com | x27marketing.com
As you can see, the purpose of this cold email template isn’t to sell a product or service, it’s to get the potential customer to schedule a call.
Once you are on a call with them, then you pitch them and hopefully close the sale.
Here’s a template that Alex provides for booking a call once the potential customer responds:
Hey, Mike!
Sure thing, I’m free next week on Thursday and Friday between 12 – 1pm PST. Would either of those work for you?
Thanks,
Alex
And if you don’t hear from them, continue to follow up. One of Alex’s favorite ways to do that is to simply send:
Bumping this up!
Note that the initial meeting should only be 15-30 minutes. As Alex explains, you are just testing the waters, figuring out if they will be a good fit for you and whether or not they can afford what you are selling.
Alex advises starting with just 10 cold emails per day for the first week.
Then, after that initial week, start increasing it by 10 emails per day, until you are averaging 100 customized emails per day.
This will allow you to test various approaches, figure out what works best for your target audience, and optimize your workflow.
“All the time that you are doing this, you should be keeping track of the total number of emails that you’ve sent, including follow ups. This will enable you to avoid hitting any maximum email limits imposed by Gmail or Outlook” he adds.
Alex doesn’t believe that cold email is the best way to go if your product or service is under $2,000 because in that case, the time spent on cold outreach won’t be worth it.
While we understand his reasoning, we would argue that if you don’t have any money for marketing, then cold email is your best option even if your product or service is super affordable.
Yes, using cold email to sell your $29/month SaaS app is not a sustainable strategy in the long run, but if you can get 200 customers this way, that’s $5,800 in monthly recurring revenue that you can then invest in paid advertising. As Paul Graham, the founder of Y-incubator, has famously said, do things that don’t scale!
Also, if you are serious about cold email, we highly recommend reading “The Cold Email Manifesto”, which is a treasure trove of actionable advice on how to make the most out of this marketing strategy.
#2 Affiliate Partnerships
When you are just starting out, you don’t have an audience. So it makes sense to partner with people who do!
When our co-founders launched ClickFunnels back in 2014, Russell already had more than a decade of experience in building sales funnels. But no one knew who he was!
So he started reaching out to people who had large audiences and offered to host webinars for their email subscribers.
Here’s how it worked:
- The person with the audience would get people to sign up by promoting Russell’s webinar to their email list.
- Russell would host the webinar and pitch ClickFunnels at the end of it. He would typically convert 20-30% of attendees.
- After the webinar, Russell and his affiliate partner would split the proceeds. It was a win-win setup!
You can use this approach to sell your B2B products and services. All you need is a webinar funnel.
Once you have that, start cold emailing people in your niche who have large audiences, get them to agree on a call and then pitch them your idea during that call.
If your webinar turns out to be a success, you can then use that as social proof in future cold outreach!
#3 Paid Advertising
We would argue that paid advertising is the best way to drive traffic to your sales funnel. Why?
Because paid traffic is targeted, immediate, and scalable. Generating revenue becomes easy once you master it!
Here’s how Laura Roeder, the founder of MeetEdgar who used paid advertising to get her business off the ground, explained it in her interview on the Indie Hackers podcast:
“So what you can do from day one is pay Google and Facebook and they will put you in front of who you want to be in front of.
You don’t have to do anything clever, it doesn’t take any time. Give Facebook a dollar and they will follow your instructions (for the most part). So that’s what we did. Right from the launch we were spending $40,000/month on Facebook ads.
I think people are scared of spending the money, but I would rather spend more on ads in the beginning. (…) Because later, you can actually have the search traffic, which to me, is the best kind of traffic.”
All major social media platforms allow you to run ads:
- YouTube
- TikTok
Pick the platform that makes the most sense for your business, create an ad campaign designed to promote your lead magnet, and start running it with a small daily budget.
Once you figure out how to run ads profitably, begin scaling your ad campaign by gradually increasing its daily budget.
And once you are confident that you have mastered paid advertising on that platform, you can expand to other platforms using the same approach.
We also recommend using paid traffic to optimize your sales funnel for conversions. This can help you 2x, 5x, or even 10x your sales funnel profits!
#4 Content Marketing
Paid advertising is great but you don’t want to remain completely reliant on it forever. That’s why it’s important to invest in creating traffic-generating assets of your own. One such asset is a company blog.
As Adam Enfroy, who launched his blog in January 2019 and turned it into a 7-figure business in just a few short years, explains:
“While you can read about a ton of fancy “hacks” and shiny new tools, there are fundamental principles that have not changed when it comes to SEO and blogging.
- Content and links
- Content and links
- Content and links
This has remained unchanged for the last 10+ years.”
So here’s what you should do if you want to build a blog that generates organic search traffic:
- Conduct keyword research and identify a promising keyword
- Create SEO content designed to rank for that keyword
- Build backlinks to that content
…then rinse and repeat with the next keyword, and the next one, and the next one. It might take several years, but if you keep at it, this SEO strategy should pay off.
Just remember that the purpose of your blog is to drive traffic to your sales funnel, so make sure to optimize your website for lead generation!
#5 Hosting a Conference
Finally, hosting an industry conference can help you take your business to the next level, especially when it comes to brand recognition.
Obviously, this is an advanced marketing strategy that is not relevant to entrepreneurs who are just starting out as it requires a significant amount of money to implement.
But it is worth considering once you stabilize your company’s finances and aren’t struggling to keep the lights on anymore.
For example, we host our Funnel Hacking LIVE conference, which has become one of the biggest industry events of the year.
Not only do we make a lot of money that way, but we also strengthen our brand. There’s a ton of funnel builder apps out there. But ClickFunnels is the name that everyone in the online marketing world recognizes!
Traditional Marketing vs. Agile Marketing
We highly advise using agile marketing instead of traditional marketing to grow your B2B business.
Traditional Marketing
Traditional marketing works like this:
- You come up with an idea for a marketing campaign.
- You create that marketing campaign by working on it in isolation without any feedback from your target audience.
- You launch that marketing campaign and hope that it works. This is known as a “Big Bang Launch” because it’s a discrete make-it-or-break-it event.
This approach makes sense when you consider the historical context in which it developed: it was the only way to promote your products and services at a large scale up until the dawn of the digital age.
However, today traditional marketing is obsolete because digital technologies have enabled marketers to get immediate feedback from their target audiences. And that changed everything!
Agile Marketing
Agile marketing works like this:
- You come up with an idea for a marketing campaign.
- You create the minimum viable version of that campaign that allows you to get feedback from your target audience with the least possible investment.
- You launch the campaign, analyze the results, and make adjustments based on the feedback that you have received. Then you repeat the cycle again. Alternatively, if your campaign fell flat, you might want to drop it altogether, go back to the drawing board, and come up with something better.
Using agile marketing to validate ideas, optimize your marketing campaigns, and scale them gradually allows you to make the most out of your marketing budget.
It can also help you avoid devastating business mistakes. Don’t bet the farm on some unproven idea that you “just know” will work!
Build a Sales Funnel for Your Business With ClickFunnels!
ClickFunnels has everything you need to build a sales funnel for your business:
- Sales funnel and landing page templates.
- Visual editor that you can use to customize those templates.
- Email marketing functionality that allows you to send broadcast emails, set up automated email sequences, and create email workflows with behavioral triggers.
We also offer a free trial which means that you can check out our software without any risk. So why not start building your Value Ladder sales funnel today?