What B2B sales actually is

Part of the Sales Academy — from no sales experience to a commercial role, with a specialism in UK life sciences and health technology. Written for graduates, scientists and career changers from any field; assumes no formal sales training; every term is defined at first use.

What you'll learn

• What B2B sales is, how it differs from B2C and from marketing, and why companies pay salespeople at all.
• Transactional vs consultative (complex) selling — and why everything in this curriculum's target market is the latter.
• Every role on the commercial org chart — SDR, AE, AM, CSM, Sales Engineer, RevOps, BD, Channel, CRO — what each does, how they hand off, the career paths between them, and how to place any prior experience you have on the map.
• How salespeople are paid: base vs variable, OTE, commission mechanics (accelerators, decelerators, draws, clawbacks, caps, SPIFFs), how quota is set, and how many reps really hit it.
• How the market is carved up: SMB / mid-market / enterprise, named accounts vs geographic patches, greenfield vs install base.
• Full-cycle AE vs the pod model, and why early-stage startups run full-cycle.
• Core vocabulary: quota, pipeline, bookings vs revenue vs ARR, win rate, ramp, and the realities of PIP culture.

1. What B2B sales actually is

B2B (business-to-business) sales means selling to another organisation rather than to an individual consumer (B2C, business-to-consumer). If you've worked in almost any organisation, you've lived near it without the vocabulary:

• a data-security vendor sells discovery software to enterprises;
• an agency sells software delivery projects to businesses;
• a clinical AI company sells radiology tools to NHS trusts.

The differences from B2C shape every job this curriculum prepares you for:

• Multiple people decide. A consumer buys trainers alone. An NHS trust buying clinical AI involves radiologists (users), the Chief Clinical Information Officer (CCIO — clinical-informatics leadership), the Clinical Safety Officer (clinical safety), IT (integration with PACS, the imaging archive), information governance (patient data), procurement and finance. Each is a stakeholder — someone with influence over the decision — and B2B selling is largely the craft of finding and aligning them.
• The sale takes months. The period from first conversation to signed contract is the sales cycle. Enterprise software cycles commonly run 3–12 months; in the NHS and pharma, 6–24 months is normal (module 7) because of governance, budget cycles and regulatory caution.
• Deal values are large and negotiated. A LIMS (Laboratory Information Management System — software that tracks samples, tests and results through a lab) deployment for a pharma company can be a six- or seven-figure, multi-year agreement with no shelf price.
• The relationship continues after signature — implementation, support, renewal, expansion — which is why half the org chart below exists.

Sales vs marketing. Marketing creates awareness at scale — content, events, advertising — and generates leads: people or companies showing some sign of interest. Sales converts individual leads into signed contracts through direct personal effort: conversations, demonstrations, proposals, negotiation. Shorthand: marketing is one-to-many, sales is one-to-few.

The handover is formalised. A lead marketing judges worth a salesperson's time is an MQL (marketing-qualified lead); once a salesperson has spoken to them and confirmed real potential it becomes an SQL (sales-qualified lead).

Why do companies pay salespeople at all? Because for complex products, revenue does not happen on its own: a hospital does not spontaneously buy an AI triage tool — someone must find the trust with the problem, reach the right clinician, build the case, navigate procurement, and hold the deal together for months while budget holders change.

Salespeople are paid well, with heavy performance incentives, because each one generates a multiple of their own cost in revenue — a rep costing £150k who brings in £1.5m of contracts is one of the best returns on payroll there is. It's also why sales is unusually open to career-changers: the market pays for demonstrated ability to move deals, not for certificates.

Transactional vs consultative (complex) sales

• Transactional selling: low price, short cycle, one or two decision-makers, product understood before the salesperson arrives — lab consumables reorders, a single licence off a price list. Volume and speed win.
• Consultative selling (also complex or solution selling): high price, long cycle, many stakeholders, and a customer who often doesn't fully understand their own problem. The salesperson's value is diagnosis before prescription: structured questioning to uncover the real problem (discovery), shaping a solution, quantifying value, and guiding the customer through their own buying process. Selling a biobank an automated sample-management platform is consultative — you're helping them rethink how they store, track and retrieve millions of samples, not quoting on a freezer.

Everything in this curriculum's target world — clinical AI to NHS trusts, LIMS to pharma R&D, biobanking platforms, CDMO services — is consultative. That is good news for anyone arriving without a sales background: it rewards technical depth, discovery skill and patience with multi-stakeholder cycles, not the fast-talking stereotype.

The interview answer. When asked "what's your selling style?", the answer is "consultative" — and the credible version comes with an example of diagnosing before prescribing, which many non-sales careers supply: scoping a research project before running it, or defining success criteria for a technical trial before starting one (a POC, proof of concept, is a structured pre-purchase trial against agreed criteria).

Voice from the field

"You can have everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want."
— Zig Ziglar, Secrets of Closing the Sale (1984)