How To Make More Money in B2B Sales

You want to make more money in your role in B2B sales. Maybe you are motivated by money, or maybe you want to provide more for your family. Whatever the reason, you need to be careful about the advice you take when it comes to accomplishing your financial goals. Here are a number of things that sound good but may harm your ability to make more money.

1. Find a hot new market with high demand. The risk in following this path is that the hot, new thing is likely to lose its blue ocean environment soon. You have seen this happen with the proliferation of all types solutions that started out as unique products but soon wound up being one of many options. You will also find the red ocean in SAAS solutions.
2. Move to a new company or industry. Maybe the salary is more than you are earning now or offers a more aggressive bonus program. The risk is that you are going to need to learn how to sell in the new company, and you might find yourself facing an even bigger challenge learning the industry.
3. Your friend offers to get you hired. A friend who also works in sales tells you about their new sales job, bragging about the money he is making. Unfortunately, your friend may have some skill or experience that makes it easy to succeed. Maybe you can succeed in the B2B sales role, or maybe it isn’t quite so easy.

How to Make More Money in B2B Sales

What follows here is a list of things you can do to make more money in B2B sales. It may take a little more time and effort, but the following strategies can get you where you want to be.

1. Unlimited Commissions: If you want to make more money, you want to work for a company that doesn’t cap your commissions. It is difficult to make more money when your company caps your compensation. Companies that cap sales commissions tend to have a certain type of culture, where leaders believe a salesperson isn’t worth a certain amount. I know one company had a CFO who complained that the sales force was overpaid, as each salesperson was making a million dollars a year. To earn that much, they had to sell many millions of dollars, which generated a proportional amount of revenue for their organization.
2. Stay in Your Current Industry: It takes time to learn an industry and their clients. Once you master your industry and how to sell effectively in it, you have an advantage over less experienced competitors. Leaving to move to another industry almost guarantees that you will have to learn how things work all over again, preventing you from making money while you get up to speed. The reason you see salespeople move companies and stay in the same industry is because they know what they need to succeed in the industry.
3. Ensure You Have Large Clients: You need a territory with large or very large clients. You will have a difficult time making more money if you have small clients that don’t spend a lot of money on what you sell. The larger the client, the larger the revenue and greater the commission.
4. Avoid Sexy Fads: You are almost certain to make more money on something that people or businesses buy every day. You may worry about selling a commodity, but these types of offerings come with a steady demand. When you sell something that a company needs to engage in its core business activities, you can constantly make sales. Anything that is a fad will fade away sooner or later.
5. Improve Your Sales Effectiveness: This is one of the main variables that determines how much money you make. You can’t have low sales effectiveness or be a low-status salesperson and make money. There are a lot of ways you can improve your sales results. You can get B2B sales training, hire a sales coach, or ask a highly effective salesperson to allow you to join them on sales calls to learn how they lead the sales conversation.
6. Use a Modern Sales Methodology: You improve your ability to make more money in B2B sales by using a sales approach aligned with what your buyers prefer. They won’t prefer to buy from you if you are unable to provide the sales experience your contacts need and want.
7. Build Life-Long Relationships with Your Clients: Your relationship should be one where you are One-Up, causing your contacts to trust you because you are an expert and an authority. The better your relationship, the easier it is to continue to sell to your existing clients. When you don’t often recognize the value of these relationships, you will find that your sales slow down.
8. Avoid Retention Problems: You want to retain your clients. Every client that leaves for another salesperson and their company will cause you to lose money. It will also cause you to have to replace a client instead of adding a net new client to your portfolio. You may have to work with your operations team to prevent churn and ensure your clients are getting the service you promised.

You and I ended up here on Planet Earth, where Nature requires us to work so we can have shelter, food, water, heat, Netflix, Hulu, Spotify, a new Tesla, a 75-inch television, and just about everything we desire. You need money for all these things and pay for your children’s education.

If you want money, the best thing you can do is to invest it in something that will cause it to increase. Money likes to multiply, but only when you put it in places where it grows.