B2B sales is the work of selling a product from one company to another company. B2B is short for business-to-business. The buyer is an organisation, not a shopper. So a single sale can take months, involve several people on the buyer's side and be worth lakhs or crores of rupees. The software that sales teams use for this work is often called sales tech.
Consider a company in Pune that sells payroll software to hospitals. Its sales team must first find the hospitals that might buy, and the person in each hospital who decides. Then it must contact that person and get a meeting. After the meeting, it must estimate whether the deal will close this quarter, send a correct quote and answer the hospital's questionnaire. When a hospital in Chennai finally signs, the company must also pay the salesperson the right commission. Each of these steps has its own software.
Underneath all of them is the customer relationship management (CRM) system. It is the record of every customer organisation, called an account, every person there, called a contact, and every possible sale, called a deal. Every other sales tool reads from the CRM and writes back to it. For this reason, the CRM is called the system of record for sales. Most companies rent it as software as a service (SaaS), and pay for each salesperson who uses it.
The first zone is lead generation. A lead is a possible customer. Here a B2B contact database supplies names, emails and phone numbers. Intent data shows which companies have started looking to buy. Account-based marketing (ABM) aims campaigns at a short list of chosen companies.
The second zone is sales outreach. A sales engagement platform runs each salesperson's planned series of emails and calls. More and more of this first contact is now written and sent by an AI SDR, an AI agent that does the job of a junior salesperson.
The third zone is revenue operations. Revenue intelligence forecasts how much the team will sell in the quarter. CPQ software builds a correct quote, and RFP software answers the buyer's long questionnaire. Incentive compensation management works out each salesperson's commission.
Many of the largest products here are sold mainly to companies in the United States. But engineers in Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Pune build a large share of them. India also has its own CRM companies. They build for Indian sales teams that call hundreds of leads a day, or that visit customers in person.