Why is it important to do B2B for social enterprises?

In our Introduction, we spoke about what business-to-business (B2B) means. In this chapter, will dive deeper into why B2B is relevant for your social enterprise, and the impact that it can bring you.

There are a wide range of benefits that come from selling to corporate partners, rather than to single consumers. These can be divided into 8 categories:

• 📈 Increased Sales and Revenue
• 💰 Financial Stability
• ✂ Reduced Costs
• 🌍 Increased Impact
• 🤝 Enhanced Trust from Investors, Customers, and Employees
• 💡 Resource Sharing and Innovation
• 👥 Building a strong network

📈 Increased Sales and Revenue

Engaging in B2B partnerships allows your social enterprise to significantly expand its market reach and sales volumes. The opportunity is massive: according to the World Bank, micro, small, and medium retailer-to-supplier (B2B) payments consist of 13.3 trillion USD per year.

B2B sales involve larger transactions compared to business-to-consumer (B2C) sales. You can secure substantial and consistent income streams, enabling your social enterprise to scale its operations and amplify its mission-driven activities.

💰 Financial Stability

B2B partnerships often offer the benefit of stability and predictability. Unlike B2C markets, which can be highly volatile and influenced by changing consumer preferences, B2B markets tend to have a more stable demand. Businesses usually plan their purchases well in advance and establish long-term partnerships, providing a steady flow of orders.

This stability can enable you to plan operations more effectively, allocate resources efficiently, and focus on your core mission without the pressure of fluctuating demands.

✂ Reduced Costs

Larger orders and long-term visibility can allow you to benefit from economies of scale, and reduce the costs of material, storage, and overheads. By working with businesses and receiving bulk orders, enhanced efficiency can be achieved.

Compared to selling to single customers, there is less variation in product range or service type, which allows for easier management of your processes.

🌍 Increased Impact

The core concept of a social enterprise lies in the fact that business and impact are interconnected. Increased sales not only boost revenue but also amplify your social impact, whether this is the number of employees from disadvantaged backgrounds you can hire or the increased reach of products and services that contribute to achieving a greener and more equitable world.

As more businesses become aware of and partner with social enterprises, the collective ability to address social and environmental issues grows.

🤝 Enhanced Trust from Investors, Customers, and Employees

When a recognised company chooses to collaborate with a social enterprise, it serves as a form of endorsement that can attract further business opportunities and investments. This invaluable brand recognition creates trust and proof that can lead to attracting new clients.

The association with B2B clients also helps build a stronger reputation which can make a big difference with potential investors in securing funding, and also help attract top talent.

💡 Resource Sharing and Innovation

B2B partnerships foster an environment of resource sharing because business clients often have specialised knowledge, skills, and technologies that can benefit your social enterprise. Through collaborations, you can improve your operational efficiency and innovation capacity.

B2B partnerships can also lead to joint ventures and co-creation of opportunities, where both parties work together on projects that align with their mutual interests and goals, fostering a symbiotic relationship. An example is the creation of a new product or service.

👥 Building a strong network

B2B partnerships offer you the opportunity to expand your network and build strategic alliances. By interacting with various businesses, you can connect with potential partners and supporters who share their values and vision. These connections can lead to collective efforts that magnify your social impact, help overcome challenges and drive innovation.

Furthermore, B2B relationships can provide you with a platform for advocacy and greater social influence, which are crucial for driving systemic change and addressing the root causes of social and environmental issues.

What is the benefit to companies?

Later in the Series, we will dive deeper in the way to position yourself and explain the benefits of a partnership to potential clients. In the meantime, here are some reports that cover the benefits from the perspective of companies:

• Catalysing Collaboration, Resonance and Catalyst 2030, 2021
• Corporate Social Innovation Compass: Accelerating Impact through Social Enterprise Partnerships, Global Alliance for Social Entrepreneurship and Deloitte, 2024
• The Social Procurement Manual, Yunus Social Business, 2022

The B2B journey, from working with SMEs to large corporates

Partnerships between social enterprises and corporates can be very rewarding — but they don’t happen overnight. It is important to know what the journey entails, and how to grow your social enterprise maturity to meet the demands of a larger business.

The standard journey would be:

1. ► Analyse: internal testing and simulation of a B2B sale
2. ► Pilot: partner with a local B2B SME
3. ► Expand: partner with international SMEs
4. ► Scale: partner with local corporate clients
5. ► Go global: partner with international corporate clients

Please remember that not all social enterprises need to achieve the same goals. Some prefer to work locally because it works better with their business model, and some might be a better fit for SMEs than corporations. The most important thing is that you know where you want to get to and what your current capabilities are.

→ Creating a social enterprise solution that works in one community or for one customer segment is very different from creating a scalable social enterprise, with repeatable sales and an efficient distribution model.

1. 1. Analyse

A social enterprise is still defining and improving all its internal ways of working and might be selling B2C. When considering starting the B2B journey, the focus shifts to internal testing. It is important to make sure that your internal operations are streamlined and ready to deliver.

In this phase you should get to know your target client and what they are looking for: certifications, quality distribution requirements, working capital, etc.

The goal is to create a robust and effective sales process, ensuring the team is well-prepared and confident before engaging with business clients. Simulations of sales interactions are conducted to anticipate potential challenges and customer queries.

4. 2. Pilot

This phase is crucial for building confidence and making necessary adjustments before scaling up the operations. The goal is to get your foot in the doors of supply chains and prepare internal operations to be able to deliver on a deal.

Initially, a social enterprise can test its B2B capability with a trusted regional SME. This would allow you to create direct relationships for easier collaboration, validate the quality of delivery, and identify any unforeseen issues.

The questions that you can ask yourself after this market test are:

• 👉 Was the delivery smooth?
• 👉 Did the product or service meet the client’s demand?
• 👉 Is the team ready to work with international or larger clients?
• 👉 Is there anything that needs to be improved before stepping up to more challenging orders?

It is normal to have to improve certain aspects of your business during the first B2B experiences. Most social enterprises may need to review their operational processes, distribution models, and pricing to adapt to B2B sales.

4. 3. Expand

Work upstream to bigger buyers to unlock even more consistent revenue. Continue to improve capacity to deliver quality products, on time, and review what channels make the most sense financially.

During this phase, you are ready to start broadening the market internationally with an SME, which helps in gaining insights into new regulatory environments and a different culture, and builds a foundation for establishing a global presence.

It is a strategic move to ensure the product or service can perform well beyond the local market and resonate with a broader audience.

Larger organisations will be more willing to take a chance on an organisation that has already had some traction and that’s how doors can also open for them.

5. 4. Scale

Grow faster, using the B2B network to bring your innovation to more people. The focus shifts to partnering with local corporate clients, significantly increasing the scale and impact of sales efforts. This phase is about demonstrating the capability to manage and sustain larger-scale operations effectively.

Corporations have a large number of employees and a significant share of the market they operate in, and partnerships bring more complex sales cycles and higher stakes. The experience and insights gained from previous phases are leveraged to handle the increased demands and expectations of corporate clients.

6. 5. Go global

The Global Phase represents the pinnacle of the B2B sales journey, where you aim to partner with international corporate clients. This phase involves navigating global market dynamics, adhering to international standards, and managing cross-border relationships.

Successfully partnering with international corporations signifies that your product or service has achieved a high level of acceptance and reliability. It requires sophisticated logistical, legal, and strategic planning to support these high-value partnerships. If you ever reach this phase, you are a significant global player in your industry.

Zoom on 🔍

Hasiru Dala Innovations

An example of a social business that has successfully scaled up through the different stages of the journey is Hasiru Dala Innovations.

Hasiru Dala Innovations (HDI) is an India-based social business that develops innovative, circular economy business models that help create a waste-free world and transition waste pickers to entrepreneurs and predictable livelihoods as an integral part of the evolving circular economy value chain. It refers to it as Inclusive Circularity®.

The organisation provides waste management services and fair-trade plastic waste. The social business has an international reach and supplies global brands including Unilever, H&M and Cofresco. Yunus Social Business supported Hasiru Dala Innovation with a long-term loan, thus helping the business to grow and scale its impact.

HDI was recognised as a Guaranteed Fair Trade Enterprise by the World Fair Trade Organisation (WFTO). This fair trade status and the social impact it created with informal waste workers was used as a differentiator to approach global brands to provide fair trade plastic waste to their supply chain to be used as recyclates in their products or packaging.

At Unilever, the Global Brand Manager for Sunsilk Shampoos became HDI’s champion internally when Unilever India was looking for a partner to pilot their Sunsilk Naturals brand with fair trade plastic. After a long sales cycle of nearly 2 years (which is standard for global corporations of Unilever’s size), the shampoo bottle is now made of 50% recycled PET made from plastic waste sourced exclusively from HDI and carries a Guaranteed Fair Trade Origin Label from WFTO.

Being a supplier to H&M also opened new doors for HDI. When H&M Foundation set out to run a collective impact program for waste pickers in Bangalore, it introduced HDI to H&M India. Their Head of Sourcing was so taken up with the idea of impacting the lives of waste pickers and informal waste entrepreneurs that he fast-tracked the piloting process with the button manufacturer and they were onboarded in just a few months.

The co-founder & CEO of HDI, Shekar Prabhakar says “The key to getting global brands to try us out was first to be authentic, transparent about everything, and being highly responsive to their processes and second to find an internal champion who orchestrates the right people to come to the table for the discussion and finally the decision.”

HDI creates better and safer livelihoods for waste pickers and informal waste workers. In the words of Shekar, “our goal is to provide the opportunities and market access to bring about a quantum change in the quality of their lives in a matter of years.”

The organisation has been awarded the ET Now Leaders of Tomorrow – Green Solutions Provider of the Year, 2024; the Sankalp Artha Global Circular Economy Award 2023 and the FICCI Circular Economy Award 2022.

Practical Tips

So far, we’ve looked at the benefits of B2B sales for social enterprises, and with the typical stages that enterprises move through to scale them up. The next chapter will guide you through the development of your own B2B strategy with practical tools and tips.

In the meantime, here are some some questions that you can start asking yourself:

• ► What stage are you in?
• ► Who is your target customer?
• ► What do you think your next step in the journey is?
• ► Is there anything you would like to test?
• ► What are you hoping to get out of your B2B journey?

Webinar: Roundtable on B2B Sales Opportunities

With Daniel Nowack, Anish Malpani, Akshay Gunteti and Ella Peinovich

How to successfully close B2B sales – learn from the best. Anish Malpani from Without, Ella Peinovich from Powered by People and Akshay Gunteti from Green Worms, discuss their success stories in this entertaining panel discussion with Daniel Nowack, from the Global Alliance of Social Entrepreneurship.

Watch Here

In the first part of this chapter, we covered the benefits that you can get from doing B2B sales, and the different phases that social enterprises can go through in their B2B journey.

Now, let’s start putting that theory into practice to build your own B2B strategy. This will be your blueprint throughout the entire process, and provide a structured approach to making decisions and effectively leading your team to deliver on them. It is important to note that your B2B strategy is not the same as your B2C strategy: the market is different.

Why is it essential to build a dedicated B2B Strategy?

In short, a strategy is a plan.

Strategy development is about understanding where you want to go, and how you plan to get there. You can think of it as a map guiding your organisation’s activities, and enabling you to find alignment between your offering, internal operations, and market demand. The quality of your execution is linked to the strategic planning behind the actions you take, which is why building a strong strategy right from the start is essential.

Pulling your team together, you can do a short strategic planning process to revisit the key components of your business through a B2B lens. To build your blueprint, you’ll need to be able to answer the following questions, which we will guide you through:

2. 1. Where are you now?
3. 2. Where do you want to be?
4. 3. How do you get there?

Analysis: Where are you now?  

The first step is to start with a current state analysis. There are a number of frameworks that you can use to help you gain an understanding of where you are now. Frameworks allow you to step back and look at the business from an objective perspective, they provide an opportunity to analyse your company and its current context in a structured way.

To help you do that, we have included three useful and straightforward frameworks below:

The SWOT Analysis

🔎 What it is: A fundamental business framework to analyse your current situation by identifying your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats related to business competition or project planning. This is an easy tool to step back from your daily work and objectively analyse your company’s situation.

🚀 How to use it: Fill out each section of the SWOT chart by yourself first, then ask a few colleagues and/or key stakeholders to provide feedback on your SWOT, or create their own. This is an effective way to compare points of view and challenge your own thinking. You might be surprised! Look at an example here.

The PESTEL Analysis

🔎 What it is: A tool used to identify the macro or external forces that your organisation is facing. The acronym PESTEL stands for Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Environmental and Legal factors. Taking into account external factors that surround you is key in building a well-rounded strategy you need to employ to remain competitive and impactful.

🚀 How to use it:

Use this tool when you are making decisions to expand into new verticals or markets, to account for external factors that might affect how you run your business. For example new sustainability standards could legislate companies to buy from companies like yours. You want to be aware of these factors as you develop your value proposition.

If you run a PESTEL, you can reuse it as part of your social business model canvas below!

Look at an example here.

The Porter’s Five Forces

🔎 What it is: A framework used to analyse the competitive environment of an industry by examining five key forces: the threat of new entrants, the bargaining power of suppliers, the bargaining power of buyers, the threat of substitute products or services, and the intensity of competitive rivalry.

🚀 How to use it: Use this framework when entering a new industry or developing new products or services. For instance, if you’re considering pivoting to  a B2B, it’s interesting to run the Porter’s 5 Forces to better understand the new competitive landscape you’re entering into. Look at an example here.

Strategy development: Where do you want to be?  

Now that you have a clear understanding of where you are now, you can shift your focus to where you want to go and how to get there. An effective strategy connects the dots between your current and future state.

The key elements you should consider at this stage include:

• 💡 Vision 
• 🚀 Mission 
• ☘️ Values
• 🎯 OKRs 
• 📢 Strategic focus areas
• 📃 Action plan

It is important to revisit the key components in your strategy to ensure they are aligned with your B2B ambitions.  Keep in mind that selling B2B will affect your key activities, including delivery, internal operations, your team, and your sales and marketing approach.

In developing an updated strategy to take this into account, you are laying out the blueprint for how the company will reorganise to sell B2B.

There are a number of frameworks you can use to help you develop the elements of your strategy, and we have included our favourite below.

Social Business Model Canvas

🔎 What it is:

✔️ A tool that entrepreneurs can use if they’re considering mixing strong impact strategies with a financially sustainable model.

✔️ It works best when regularly revisited so you can iterate and build on it over time.

✔️ It is specifically adapted to social enterprises to map their social mission and business building blocks.

🚀 How to use it:

There are 14 boxes, which you fill one-by-one to slowly build your strategy and social business model.

We strongly recommend running this as a team exercise. Bring either your entire team or key colleagues to think about what your strategy looks like together.

Check the dedicated website for more free templates and even a digital framework available on Mural so you can easily fill it out digitally.

How do you get there? Working backwards from your goals

There are two types of goals: Final goals VS Performance goals, and you need both.

Final goals are long-term, while performance goals define the journey to get there. A final goal could be to sell to a local corporate client, but there are a set of specific steps to undertake before getting there – like identifying potential clients, building your pitch deck, etc.

Sometimes the performance goals are more important than the final goals as they create systems and habits for long-term success.

We’ve included below three goal-setting frameworks to help you set goals in a way that you’re most likely to achieve them. These are the SMART, PURE, and CLEAR frameworks. Refer to the graphic below to quickly organise your thoughts into each framework:

🚀 How to use these frameworks:

► Start by brainstorming your goals for the year for the business  – aim to have between 6-10.

► Look at your goals and ask yourself – are these really this year’s goals? Set aside longer-term goals for the business.

► Divide your goals into final and performance goals.

► Then fill in the blanks (i.e. a corresponding performance or final goal)

• e.g. final goal is to make $200K in revenue this year > performance goal can be to set up a quarterly sales & proposal application process to identify, complete and submit proposals worth at least $100K per quarter (assuming for a 50% success rate).

• e.g. performance goal is to set up an employee onboarding, mentorship and coaching programme and run this with the team > final goal would be to have a team of empowered, confident employees who can perform their roles with minimal supervision.

► Finally, check to see if your goals are SMART, PURE & CLEAR, and adjust if needed.

B2B Strategy Checklist

Now that you have revisited the overall company strategy from a B2B perspective, work through the following checklist to round out your B2B strategy:

1. Identify your target market: How is this market segmented? What problems are you solving for? What is the market opportunity?

2. Develop a compelling value proposition: Are you able to clearly articulate how we are solving their problem? How does your product/service fulfil a business need they have?

3. Define your pricing model: How will you price your product/service? Will you price based on cost, value, or competition? For your organisation’s financial health, how will you manage cash flow based on a buyer’s payment terms?

4. Understand your customer decision making process: What is their procurement process? , Who makes purchasing decisions? Who needs to champion your product/service internally within the company?

5. Identifying channels to reach your customers: Are you going to sell directly to the company, or do you need to go through an indirect channel?

6. Define sales objectives and periodically measure them: What sales targets do you have for the month/quarter/year? What processes do you need to put in place to measure sales performance?

7. Marketing and branding: What communication support do you have in place to support your sales efforts? What materials do you need to prepare for clients?

8. Team: What team do you need to put in place to reach your goals? How do you train and incentivise them to sell your product/service?

9. Sales strategy and execution: What processes do you have in place to revisit your strategy and test your assumptions? What internal changes need to be made to successfully execute your strategy?

Note: If you want hands-on support developing these elements for your enterprise, you can access highly skilled consultants at no cost via our partners at the TRANSFORM Support Hub. Register here for access.

Managing your strategy as an ongoing process

Your strategy always needs to be refined and adapted. For this, we recommend setting up a strategic review process. You can repeat the entire cycle of Analysis > Strategy Development > Goals setting, or only parts of it, on a regular basis.

👉 Remember that a strategy isn’t a constitution that must be accepted as correct at all times. Strategies might have to be adapted based on feedback from the market, unexpected changes, or operational challenges.

👉 Strategy development is a dynamic process. It can’t be a document that sits in a drawer and gets forgotten. Instead, it must be engraved in everyone’s daily routine and integrated into OKRs, KPIs, and other progress measurements

It’s up to every enterprise to find the right balance between giving enough attention to strategy, and staying time-efficient. As you set up your own process, here are a few tips to keep in mind:

• 🗓️ Have some parts of the review process occur annually, and some quarterly
• 🤝 Involve your whole team, and for larger social enterprises, know when to delegate
• 📊 Track your progress
• 🧠 Use strategy reviews as a reflection & learning process
• 🎯 Tackle strategic issues head-on and set strategic goals
• 📈 Align KPIs of individuals to company-wide strategic priorities
• ✅ Make sure everyone has a clear strategic priority at the end of each session & every priority is owned
• 📝 Document the results of these reviews in order to be able to come back to it and also to onboard new team members into it

Additional resources

• ► The Social Impact Hub created a great webinar on Strategy, check it out here.
• ► Scale UP has a dedicated section for social enterprises, check it out here.
• ► EOS provides a service for strategic planning, you can find more information here.
• ► MovingWorlds created a resource on strategic planning, you can find it here.
• ► A Go-To-Market 55 min video Bootcamp for field sales, you can find it here.

• ► This post explains how to use the STAR framework to identify areas that need to be changed if the overall strategy shifts eg. changing from a B2C to a B2B model.
• ► The Strategyzer website has a lot of free tools in its library, which are all open-source.
• ► Lenny’s Newsletter, which is free, and includes a 7-part series for scaling B2B sales, which you can sign up for here.
• ► The Rumelt Framework: An approach to help take the nebulous concept of strategy and make it concrete. It’s outlined in detail in the book, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy by Richard P. Rumelt.

Webinar: Creating a Winning B2B Sales Strategy

• With Amadou Sanankoua, Founder and CEO, Onpoint Africa Group

• The “Building Bridges” report highlights B2B opportunities for social enterprises, showcasing how collaboration with corporations drives sustainable development. It provides case studies, strategies for scaling impact, and actionable insights for integrating social enterprises into corporate supply chains.

• Watch here

In the last chapter, we focused on how to develop a strong B2B strategy and provided a checklist of key components to include in your strategy.

In this one, we will focus on how to ensure your company’s value proposition aligns to your customer needs. This will save you time and resources when you start executing your sales strategy. The goal is to focus on the right client targets and yield higher returns for your sales investments.

Customer segmentation and positioning

Before diving into sales mode, it is important to define a clear product/service position. Through product/service positioning, you understand what market you are playing in, what your offer is, and who is interested in the offer you have taken to market. It’s often said by service-based businesses (such as marketers and business coaches) that their offerings are “suitable for everybody.” However, this broad approach is where many business owners fail: overly generic offers fail to capture the attention of any specific audience. Defining a niche is essential for standing out and resonating with potential clients!

You will also want to understand where you operate in a potential customer’s value chain, and map this out. Check out the value chain mapping and value proposition resources found at the end of this chapter.

The next step will be to develop your customer segmentation. Ask yourself which type of businesses would be interested in your offer, and categorise them. Once you define them, you will want to start speaking to individuals at these different types of companies to really understand their needs. This allows you to move from assumptions to identifying your potential customers. You will want to focus your efforts on the customer segments that have the following:

• 💡 Greatest need for what you have to offer – value proposition alignment
• 💰 Possibility to pay at the price point that allows you to be profitable – financial sustainability alignment
• 📈 Biggest market opportunity – product-market fit alignment
• 🌍 Impact – sustainability alignment

This is an iterative process: often, conversations with who you thought your target audience was will help refine what types of businesses are actually most in need of the product/service you are offering. While this initial customer research may take time, it will allow you to speed ahead later because you will not be wasting time on the wrong sales target. It will also enable you to pick up customer insights that you can use in your messaging to convert potential leads. Best of all, it can convert an interviewee into an eventual customer if there is alignment!

Understanding your target client

How do you get to know your clients? What do you need to know?

The best way to get to know your potential clients is to speak to them. Once you have the target customer segment narrowed down, you want to become an expert on the clients in this segment (how they think, what matters to them, how they make decisions, and most importantly what problems you are solving for them).

Below are three frameworks that can be useful when going through this discovery process:

Who is the right client?

To define your ideal customer profile (ICP), you need to be able to answer the following questions. Pick the points that are the most relevant to your business model, and try to be as specific as possible:

Company Size

• 👉 What is the size of the companies you aim to work with? e.g., is it an SME or a corporate?
• 👉 How many employees do they have? What is their annual turnover?

Type of Business

• 👉 What type of businesses are you targeting?
• 👉 What industry and sector are they in?

Job Title / Role

• 👉 Who within these companies do you want to interact with?
• 👉 What are their job titles or roles?

Pain Points

• 👉 What specific pain points or challenges do your target clients face that your solutions can address?
• 👉 How can you help make their jobs easier?

Way of Working

• 👉 What are the unique working methods or processes of your target clients?
• 👉 How can your solutions integrate or enhance these methods?

Specific Solutions Used

• 👉 What specific technologies, materials or tools do your target clients use?
• 👉 How can your solutions complement these technologies?

Price Point

• 👉 What price range is your target client willing to pay for solutions like yours?
• 👉 Is your solution premium or below the average price?

Geography

• 👉 Where are your target clients located geographically?
• 👉 Do you need to consider any regional differences in your approach?

By answering these questions, you can map your ideal client, and make sure that you design your strategy effectively around their needs.

You might end up with more than one ideal ICP, but try to stick to 2 to 3 maximum. Remember to make sure that they are all relevant to your value proposition.

Empathy Mapping

What is empathy mapping?

Empathy Mapping is an exercise that helps you to identify the thoughts and feelings of a buyer persona or ideal customer profile (ICP) on a specific issue. Even if you are convinced that your products or services are very relevant for them, they might not see it that way. This exercise enables you to look at the issue through their eyes and empathise with their feelings.

Choose the ICP you want to work with and imagine being in their shoes. If you feel clear about your persona, you can fill out the empathy map below with your assumptions, from their perspective. You can also do some research to validate your assumptions, such as conducting a few interviews or attending events where your buyer personas speak and exchange ideas.

The Empathy Map goes through 6 elements:

• 😣 Pains: What are the pain points in the user’s life? What are their needs?
• 😁 Gains: What are the user’s expectations for meeting their needs?
• 🧐 Think and feel: What are the user’s major worries and aspirations? What are their values? What preoccupies their mind?
• 🦻 Hear: Who are the user’s main influences in their life?
• 👀 See: What does the user see in their environment that influences them?
• 🗣 Say and do: What does the user say and do to meet their needs?

You can find a downloadable template on Asana here, and we’ll walk you through an example of how to fill it in below.

Empathy Map example

We did the exercise as if we were a social enterprise in the fashion sector. Our target client is Stephanie Davis, a procurement manager at a large fashion brand. In this scenario, Stephanie is looking for a supplier of more sustainable and transparent regenerative cotton textile that fits compliance, as Gen Z buyers are pushing the brand towards more sustainability and transparency.

Once your empathy map is completed, take a step back and review your strategy and operational decisions:

• ► Does my strategy fit my buyer persona?
• ► Am I highlighting the right points to address their needs?

Delivering value to your customer

What are you doing for them?

The most important thing about getting to know your ideal client is to make sure that you know how you can help them, and why they will want to work with you.

Why would a corporate buyer want to work with a social enterprise?

• 👉 Are you helping them with their sustainability agenda? Then you need to learn their social and environmental goals
• 👉 Are you helping them to solve a specific technical issue? Then you need to make sure you understand their problem and how your solution integrates with their existing technologies
• 👉 Is there a reputation or branding issue that you can help them solve? Then you need to know exactly how your solution is linked to it

Do you speak corporate? Use impact to your advantage with the right wording!

Corporations are doing more social responsibility initiatives and ESG reporting, which opens many B2B sales opportunities for social enterprises. When a client prioritises sustainability, a social enterprise can tailor its offerings to highlight how it contribute to the client’s sustainability goals, thereby enhancing their value proposition. This alignment not only facilitates smoother collaboration but also helps in establishing long-term relationships based on shared values and mutual benefits.

By ensuring that your potential clients uphold strong sustainability standards, you can also maintain your own integrity and reputation. Additionally, by promoting and supporting responsible corporate behaviour, social enterprises can leverage their influence to encourage broader adoption of sustainable practices across industries, further advancing their social and environmental objectives.

We will deep-dive into corporate sustainability practices in the second part of our chapter!

Additional Resources

🔍 Value Mapping: TRANSFORM Support Hug Guide #1: Finding Product Market fit with Value Chain Mapping exercise  and Value Proposition Canvas

Building Allies & Key Partnerships

with Jamie Leidelmeyer, Founder at Asthenos Consulting

In this webinar, Jamie Leidelmeyer, Founder of Asthenos Consulting, discusses the importance of building alliances and finding champions that can shorten your path into major global value chains. The consulting firm is specialised in helping companies integrate sustainability and social impact in their business models.

Watch Here

In the first part of this chapter, we spoke about how to identify your clients, how to map their value chains to understand where you fit in, and how to understand the problems you are solving for them. In this section, we will focus on the sustainability practices and mandates that corporations typically have in place to help you better navigate social procurement opportunities.

At the end of this chapter, you will be able to adapt your value proposition to potential corporate client’s sustainability priorities, and you will be able to present your offer using the terminology that corporations use internally. In other words, you will be speaking corporate!

Using corporate sustainability to your advantage

Let’s start with the basics! Corporate buyers often have existing suppliers and a functional supply chain, so there must be a new need, problem, or requirement for them to want to work with a new social enterprise. This often falls into the category of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG), which is a framework used to assess an organisation’s business practices and performance on various sustainability and ethical issues. It is widely used by investors and shareholders, which is why companies have a higher incentive to prioritise their sustainability initiatives. Most social enterprises exist to advance a cause which falls in the “E” or the “S” of ESG → use this momentum to your advantage!

👉 Note on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs (different from ESG!): This is not a cause in itself, but a sustainability framework developed by the United Nations which lists a set of 17 goals to achieve globally by 2030 to ensure sustainable development. You should know which SDG(s) your value proposition can contribute to. Each goal has clear targets, which can help you measure your impact as well.

Key sustainability concepts

Corporations are looking for social procurement opportunities that make business sense. Does your offer allow them to reach their sustainability goals? Is it competitively priced? Does it meet quality standards? Is it something that they need? You can perfect your pitch and communication materials by understanding how corporate sustainability works, and ensuring that you make the case for how you can help advance their sustainability goals by selling them a solution to a new problem that they want to solve. The more you know about a potential client’s goals, the better you’ll be able to articulate how your solution helps achieve them!

Sustainability is a broad concept which can be divided into three categories within ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance). You can find a list of subtopics within each category below:

• Source: PWC, Sustainability and ESG Oversight, the corporate director’s guide, 2022

Let’s look at some of those topics in more detail to help you understand and align your messaging before pitching your offer to corporations:

🌎 Carbon Emissions and Foot-printing

• Carbon foot-printing measures the total greenhouse gas emissions caused directly and indirectly by an individual, organisation, event, or product. It is relevant to corporate sustainability practices as it helps companies understand their environmental impact, set reduction targets, and implement strategies to minimise emissions – thereby mitigating climate change and enhancing their environmental stewardship. If you have a solution that helps companies measure their carbon footprint or minimise it, you will want to understand how to position your offer to meet their needs in this area.

♻️ Circularity and Waste Elimination

• Circularity refers to designing products and systems in a way that maximises resource use and minimises waste through reuse, recycling, and regeneration. For corporations, embracing circularity can lead to significant reductions in material costs, decrease environmental impact, and foster innovation in product design. To do this, they must consider materials that can be reused or recycled, as well as traceability solutions to ensure that they know where these materials are coming from. A lot of social enterprises provide circular solutions, and you can find a range of tools and resources related to circularity on the website of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.

💧Water Efficiency

• Water efficiency involves using water resources more effectively to reduce waste and ensure sustainable supply. In corporate sustainability, improving water efficiency helps companies reduce operational costs, mitigate risks associated with water scarcity, and minimise their environmental footprint, thus ensuring long-term sustainability and compliance with environmental regulations. If your solution can make irrigation more efficient or ensure clean water for their raw materials and communities they work in, you will want to highlight the business needs as well as the environmental impact of your solution. Alternative materials that use less water also contribute to water efficiency, so make sure that you know if your solution can help even in an indirect way.

🫂 Diversity and Inclusion (D&I)

• D&I in the workplace promotes a culture where different perspectives, backgrounds, and abilities are valued and integrated. This can be applied in recruitment processes, building design, accessibility of websites, and a lot more! For companies, D&I practices enhance creativity, improve problem-solving, and foster innovation, while also contributing to social sustainability by ensuring equitable opportunities and creating a more inclusive society. Are you a social enterprise that supports the well-being of people from disadvantaged backgrounds (including people experiencing poverty, people with disabilities, or members of racially minoritised groups)? You can measure your D&I contributions, and consider developing a D&I strategy. Learn more here.

💸 Living Wages

• Living wages are wages that are high enough to maintain a normal standard of living. Implementing living wage policies in corporate practices ensures that employees can meet their basic needs, contributing to their overall well-being and economic stability. This is critical for sustainability as it promotes social equity, reduces poverty, and enhances the reputation and ethical standards of businesses. Corporations are incentivised to work with players in their value chain that provide a living wage and create economic mobility opportunities to spur job creation.

Now that we have a good sense of key sustainability concepts that corporations prioritise, we will dive into how they measure their progress and how you can stand out by contributing to their reporting targets.

How corporate reporting works

KPIs and Targets

Companies track their progress towards sustainability objectives, identify areas needing improvement, and take action to demonstrate their commitment to stakeholders. Corporate sustainability Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are specific metrics that companies use to measure and manage their sustainability performance. Common examples include measuring greenhouse gas emissions per unit of revenue, percentage reduction in waste sent to landfills, and improvements in workforce diversity and inclusion.

Setting targets for these KPIs is crucial for driving continuous improvement and accountability within the organisation. Targets provide clear, quantifiable goals that align with the company’s overall sustainability strategy and long-term vision. For instance, a company might set a target to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2030 or to source 100% of its energy from renewable sources within five years.

These targets not only guide internal efforts and resource allocation, but also communicate the company’s sustainability ambitions to investors, customers, and regulators. Achieving these targets often requires innovation, collaboration, and investment, reflecting the company’s dedication to creating a positive impact on society and the environment.

Part of a social enterprise’s value proposition is the ability to contribute to achieving these targets. One way to stand out from the competition is to be able to provide reporting data on the sustainability principles linked to your offer.

Two reporting frameworks that are very important if you want to integrate in a corporate value chain are:

1. 1. Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs): The impact of a product or process can be calculated with LCAs, which measure all the utilities and materials that are used through its lifecycle. Companies might also ask you to calculate the carbon footprint of your services, and there are several tools that you can use to do so -you can find a comparison here. There are many impact categories in an LCA, but the reduced version only measures the carbon impact.

2. 2. Traceability: Traceability is the ability to track the journey of products and materials throughout the supply chain. It is crucial for corporate sustainability as it ensures transparency, accountability, and ethical sourcing, allowing companies to verify the sustainability of their supply chain practices, detect and mitigate risks, and build consumer trust by demonstrating their commitment to responsible production. There are several product traceability solutions that you can use, including RFID, QR codes, and GPS trackers. You can find a comparison here!

Reporting regulations and standards

New regulations are defining how companies have to follow reporting requirements. An example is the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) that went into effect in 2023 as part of the European Green Deal. EU law requires all large companies and all listed companies (except listed micro-enterprises) to disclose information on what they see as the risks and opportunities arising from social and environmental issues, and on the impact of their activities on people and the environment.

There are also a range of voluntary ESG reporting standards that a company can adhere to. The most common one is the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), which provides guidelines for sustainability reporting to ensure that companies are measuring the correct variables. You can find a guide here.

👉 Note on compliance (which is different from sustainability!): a product’s conformance to regulations and requirements is referred to as compliance. This is different from sustainability, which focuses on the preservation of the environment and people. Compliance is not a goal, but a necessity. It is essential to be compliant to all laws and regulations, otherwise any sustainability efforts will be undermined.

While we do not need to be experts on corporate reporting standards, as a social enterprise selling with a sustainability angle, it is important to have an understanding of the trends happening in corporate reporting and how they affect your own B2B partnerships. This understanding will help you better understand the needs of the sustainability and procurement teams you will be speaking with, and ensure you align your messaging accordingly.

Certifications to mitigate risk

A key aspect of corporate reporting and risk management practices is certification. Certifications provide a credible assurance that the products or services they are purchasing adhere to recognised environmental and social standards, helping to mitigate risk and ensure compliance with regulatory requirements. They also enhance the company’s reputation by demonstrating a commitment to responsible sourcing and corporate social responsibility.

In their reporting, companies use these certifications to provide transparent evidence of their sustainability efforts to stakeholders, including investors, customers, and regulatory bodies. This transparency can improve stakeholder trust, potentially leading to competitive advantages such as increased customer loyalty and investor interest.

Sustainability certifications are often featured prominently in sustainability reports and other public disclosures, communicating the company’s progress towards its goals.

You will want to research the certifications that are most pertinent to your industry. As there are many, please be sure to check with potential buyers about which certifications are most recognised and relevant to them. Here is already a list of some key sustainability certifications. This is covered in more depth as part of the chapter on Impact Measurement and Management (IMM).

Implementation Checklist: how to align with corporate requirements

How can you put this theoretical knowledge into practice? Follow these steps:

1. Identify your clients based on what best matches your business model, using the model in the first topic of this chapter

2. Map your clients based on the customer segmentation and empathy mapping frameworks we shared in the first part of this chapter.

3. Apply the empathy mapping framework to ensure that you understand the needs of your clients well

4. Find your client’s channels of communication:

• ► Website
• ► Sustainability Report
• ► Social Media
• ► Marketing in stores
• ► News articles

5. Understand where your business model can help them with their goals:

• ► Learn key sustainability concepts (see above)
• ► Identify  what goals you can help them achieve as a social enterprise
• ► Understand their priorities, and what they seem to communicate to their clients and other stakeholders
• ► Understand  their risks, and how are you helping them mitigate those risks

• Examples:
• ► Are you contributing to waste reduction? Or Diversity and Inclusion? Or Carbon offsetting?
• ► How much can your collaboration help them to achieve their goals? Try to use numbers when possible!
• ► If a soda company is working to reduce their plastic impact and you are a social entrepreneur providing a solution for localised plastic recycling, you need to be able to communicate what % of their goal could be achieved through your technology if it was applied in a specific geographical area.

6. Understand the factors beyond sustainability that will make you stand out:

• ► Is your price matching their target?
• ► What business problem are they trying to solve, are you helping with it?
• ► Will you bring them differentiation within the market?
• ► What other benefits will you bring to their business?
• ► Do you bring a new set of clients, a network, an innovation?

7. What certifications do they require?

• ► Do you have the right certifications? What risk do these certifications mitigate?
• ► Is your target client requesting specific certifications to work with them? Consider whether this is a good fit with you and go through the certification process to achieve it
• ► Is your target client certified, or have they communicated the goal to achieve a certification? Ensure that you learn about it, and know how you can help them achieve it

8. Ensure that your communication and proposal are aligned with their goals:

• ► Make sure you speak their language
• If they talk about a certain sustainability topic publicly, make sure you include the wording they use in your communications
• If they require certifications, make sure you have them
• If they have a specific need, make sure that you go straight to the point on how you can help them solve it
• ► Use the same concepts that you find in their sustainability reports
• ► Quantify how much progress towards an established target your solution can create for them
• ► Ensure that you explain why your solution is better than others

Additional Resources

• ► Moving Worlds Blog: Finding Product Market Fit
• ► CSO Futures Article: How to navigate the changing world of sustainability standards
• ► Reuters Report: The state of corporate ESG
• ► Report CSRD Risks: Transforming ESG Reporting Challenges Into a Business Advantage

To start, we will deep dive into the concept of a sales process. Then, we will guide you through the design of your sales approach, offer advice to help guide your sales team, and show you how to identify the right team and contact person to approach at each point in the process. We also have a wonderful interview with Fernanda Stefani from 100% Amazonia including plenty of practical tips.

While this section will cover both the direct and indirect channels to reach buyers, the second half of the chapter will focus exclusively on the outbound sales approach of responding to bids. This will include best in class tips on proposal writing, along with practical tips to negotiate conditions that are in your favour.

Sales process design

Broadly speaking, there are two ways to reach B2B customers:

📥 Inbound sales occur when a customer hears about your product/service and reaches out to you directly to learn more. This is a cost-effective way to reach your customers as it does not require a sales force, and it helps you focus on qualified leads that are already interested in your offering.

Inbound sales use inbound marketing to provide valuable content and insights through social media channels, blogs, and other media to bring visibility to what you are selling.

📤 Outbound sales focus on direct outreach to a customer who has not yet expressed interest in a product or service offered by your business.

In order for this approach to scale the volume of your sales, you need to have a sales team in place and a clear outreach and lead identification plan to avoid wasting resources on the wrong customers.

There is no right or wrong approach, and most organisations will use a combination of both inbound and outbound sales in their sales process. With that said, the right approach can depend on where you are in your B2B journey. If you are still looking for product-market fit and aligning the needs of potential customers with your offering, you as the owner/founder may want to take a lead on sales as the discovery process can uncover  insights you may not want to miss. Once you are clear on your offering, how it is positioned, and have happy clients, you can then train a sales team to take over.

What does a sales process look like?

The 7 steps model

Let’s take a closer look at the approach most relevant for those earlier in their B2B journeys: outbound sales.

For outbound sales, the first step entails identifying and targeting businesses that align with your offering’s impact, as described in our last chapter. Once the target client is identified, the initial focus should be on relationship-building through personalised outreach, highlighting your unique value proposition and impact. Leveraging digital tools for customer relationship management (CRM) can help you streamline communications and manage leads effectively. Here are the 7 steps involved in  a standard sales cycle, when taking an outbound sales approach to social procurement:

👀 Research and Preparation

• You research and understand your buyer persona.
• You develop a strong offering and align your solution with the customer’s real needs.
• You identify the right channel(s) to approach your customer (direct, value chain player, intermediary).
• You understand the decision making unit at the corporation you are targeting.
• You use a CRM tool to track prospective customers and nurture leads.

💬 Approach

• You contact your prospective customer (or value chain player), either in person or by email/phone/letter etc.
• You identify allies that can help facilitate introductions to B2B decision makers for you.

📢 Presentation

• Here you have to demonstrate how your product or service meets the needs of your potential customers, and how you can help them solve a business or ESG issue they are facing.
• Use this as an opportunity not just to sell, but also to learn – listen to their needs, and ensure there is alignment with your offering. You may learn about new product features/services you will want to add to your existing offering to make it more responsive to their needs.
• Depending on the size of the organisation, you may need to submit a formal bid and go through an RFP (request for proposals) process before proceeding. This will be covered in the second part of this chapter.

🔎 Due diligence

• This is where your customer will make sure that they are not incurring any risk by working with you. Having certifications from key certification boards will help you build trust with companies during the due diligence process.

🤝 Negotiation

• If a deal goes through, you may need to negotiate terms to win a sale. There will be discussions on payment terms, budget, and scope. This might also involve adjusting the terms of a service or maintenance agreement.

✅ Closing

• The entire sales process reaches a critical point: hopefully a deal is made and a contract signed.

📩 Follow-up

• The sales process isn’t over yet! Make sure that your customer is satisfied with the sale, ask for feedback, and keep a positive relationship to encourage existing  customers to continue working with you in the future.

• Depending on the nature of your business, this could lead to a contract renewal, or referral to another B2B lead who could benefit from your offering.
• Having a documented sales process helps you know when and how to move a deal through the stages of the sales pipeline, increasing the chances of closing. Without this process, you might push your product before the prospect is ready for a solution, or wait too long for fear of being pushy or aggressive.

👉 Remember the online event we had about Creating a Winning B2B Strategy featuring Amadou Sanankoua, Founder and CEO of OnePoint Africa Group? Having a lot of experience in B2B, he shared many invaluable insights and tips on developing your sales strategy – you can rewatch it here!

During that workshop, Amadou shared an outline of the journey you should follow (see below), which mirrors back to the seven steps above and learnings from previous chapters.

Who to approach?

The right organisation in the value chain

For a B2B sale, a social enterprise should reach out to the best strategically placed stakeholders. These include:

👤 Corporates/Brands: Corporate brands often seek to enhance their CSR efforts, so they will be the ones interested in creating a partnership with you. They hold the final purchasing power, and have the final say in business decisions.

👤 Suppliers: Suppliers are crucial as they provide raw materials or components to corporate brands, which  sometimes involves aggregating materials/services from multiple social enterprises. They also may have a mandate from their corporate buyer to become more sustainable, and oftentimes have an R&D budget. Depending on what you are selling, this could be an interesting part of the value chain to explore.

👤 Subcontractors: Subcontractors handle parts of the production process. Similarly to suppliers, they can be approached to integrate social impact practices within their operations.

👤 Intermediaries: Intermediaries, such as certifying bodies, NGOs, sustainability research centres, distributors, and agents can extend your reach to a broader market. In the interview below you can learn more about the role of these entities!

As always, think of the needs of each value chain player, and how you can help them solve their problems!

The right team within the organisation

Navigating the structure of a large corporate buyer can be extremely confusing. There are many internal teams with different roles, and it’s important to know who the right contact is at different stages of the sales cycle.

Procurement managers are crucial as they manage the purchasing decisions and can advocate for incorporating ethically sourced and socially responsible products into the corporation’s supply chain.

Innovation employees focus on driving new and impactful ideas within the company. They are important allies as they often seek partnerships that can bring fresh, mission-driven solutions to market challenges.

Sustainability employees are essential contacts, as they are directly responsible for the organisation’s environmental and social impact goals. This makes them natural supporters of products or services that align with these objectives. Additionally, reaching out to CSR managers can be beneficial, as they are tasked with enhancing the company’s social and ethical footprint.

Who is the decision-maker? Practical tips to navigate communications

Given this information on different value chain players and teams, here are a few practical tips to help you navigate communications:

👉 If you get a chance to speak to someone at a company, don’t be shy to ask them how purchasing decisions typically get made, and who within the company you should be speaking to in order to better understand their needs and ultimately close a sale.

👉 Make sure that you know where to position yourself in the value chain. Get clear on who will be the user of your product or service, whose problem you are solving, and which buyer persona you’re dealing with.

👉 Make sure that you understand who is making the final decisions: this is the buyer persona you should be focusing on. For a refresher, return to the previous chapter.

👉 Make sure that you have researched your buyer persona accurately, and that you know exactly what their pain points are and how you can help address them.

Real-World Example: Interview with Fernanda Stefani from 100% Amazonia

• Fernanda Stefani
• Co-founder & CEO of 100% Amazonia

We had the honour of interviewing the founder of the Brazilian social enterprise 100% Amazonia on the topics of B2B sales and working with corporations. Check out the valuable insights she shared with us below!

Can you explain what your social enterprise does?

• We are a B Corp specialising in innovative solutions that transform Amazonian resources into unique ingredients. We offer renewable, non-timber forest bio ingredients produced in collaboration with communities, local cooperatives, and family farms to leverage the best of the Amazon rainforest.

• We first started as a trading company to help Amazonian communities to sell and export their products. But we were struggling to scale, due to challenges in quality, regularity, and quantity. To address these, we shifted our approach and created a processing facility called the Factory of Forest. This facility processes everything we receive from the community — turning fruits into purees, extracting oils, or producing butter. We transitioned into production to scale our operations effectively.

Can you tell us about the beginning of your B2B journey and your B2B clients?

• Our B2B journey began when we realised the need to educate consumers on the Amazonian forest, and the respect of nature and local communities. I founded our company to empower communities rather than just buying products from them.

• We secured deals with large brands such as LUSH, Firmenich, Nestlé and Kerry Group. We achieved that not because of our positive impact on people and the planet, but because of the great quality and competitive price of our products. We understood that impact unfortunately doesn’t sell. But the product does.

Is this how you differentiate from other suppliers?

• Exactly. Remember, companies don’t buy impact, they buy products and services. The impact is just a differentiator. This was so frustrating when I found out, but unfortunately it is the reality today. And social entrepreneurs need to know that: they need a good product or service, at the right price, if they want to convince clients.

How did you find the right player in the value chain to work with?

• Our business model is based on buyer diversity, not limited to one industry, so we had to balance our business model to cater to both final product brands and their suppliers. We make sure our portfolio is diverse by selling to clients across various industries: we sell our ingredients and processed products to food, beverage, and cosmetics companies.

• Initially, we identify the distribution channel and then choose our customers. As a B2B and B2B2C company, we find it easier to engage with small and medium-sized companies, because we can close contracts faster than with large companies (which can take up to two years). It is also easier to find contacts in those smaller organisations. However, contracts with SMEs tend to be smaller. It is therefore important to have clients of all sizes in your portfolio to ensure stability and growth.

Did you face any challenges in working with companies?

• Yes, of course. One of the main challenges is meeting the demands of large companies. They have such high and strict requirements that it can feel impossible to meet their demands. They need to understand the capacities of social enterprises and learn to be patient. And it’s not only because of organisational differences, but also because of cultural differences between regions. The way of doing business will be very different between regions in Brazil, and therefore different from the way it works in the Amazon.

• This is why communication is so key. Companies need to hear our reality and be ready to adapt their processes if needed. As impact entrepreneurs, we believe in collaboration over competition and emphasise transparency and honesty in all customer interactions.
• Another gap we face with clients is the timelines. Sometimes, large companies can only pay us in 90 days, whereas we need the cash flow sooner to secure our production and our impact to the communities. Again, it is key that clients are open for discussion and ready to adapt.

Did any intermediary organisation help you connect with your clients?

• Yes, many of our clients come through partnerships with NGOs like WWF and TNC Conservancy. These networks often refer significant customers to us. For smaller companies, we attend trade shows, leveraging our B-Corp status to connect with like-minded businesses.

How do you find and approach your customers?

• Our approach phase varies depending on the company size. For smaller companies, we often meet them at trade shows. For larger companies, we may come through R&D departments, though this takes longer. Sometimes, top-down approaches work best. That’s what happened with Kerry Group, when the CEO himself came to our organisation to find a specific ingredient they needed to create a new beverage.

• We also collaborate with distributors to extend our reach. But companies try more and more to avoid middlemen, in order to ensure traceability in the supply chain.

What is your process for handling larger bidding processes and contracts with large customers?

• We start by identifying all potential distribution channels and industries we want to sell to. We then identify the right customers. Using CRM software, we rate potential leads to ensure they are suitable. Once we have entered into contact with a lead, this can take a lot of time as we’re in the ingredient industry.

• Selling ingredients involves a detailed process: creating a product formula, conducting consumer tests, and if successful, proceeding to larger orders. The entire process can take up to 18 months. And the client needs to wait until the consumer test results before telling us if they want to purchase more. Overall, on all the processes we launch with clients, we have a success rate of 39%.

• Also, having good legal and accounting support is crucial to manage contracts and ensure we can meet demand. Transparent communication with customers is essential to align expectations and realities.

What advice would you give to other social entrepreneurs selling or wanting to sell to B2B clients?

• One of the most important things to me is: be true to yourself. Every time you talk to a potential customer, always be transparent and honest. And don’t think the impact you generate will be enough to them: make sure your product is of high quality and competitively priced. From there, your impact will be the differentiator to traditional suppliers.

• Fernanda Stefani, Co-founder & CEO of 100% Amazonia

Checklist

• ✔️ Did you prioritise the customer segments you want to sell to, so you can focus your resources on the segments with the highest potential?

• ✔️ Did you design your sales team based on your availability, size, and type of customer?
• ✔️Did you understand the difference between inbound and outbound sales?
• ✔️ Did you understand what your sales process looks like to align your team around a consistent, repeatable approach for each high-priority customer segment?
• ✔️ Did you understand who you should reach out to throughout different stages of the sales process, and the role of intermediaries, subcontractors, and brands?
• ✔️Did you use both social impact and a great offering to your advantage to differentiate your offering and win sales?
• ✔️Did you learn from your processes, and make sure that you follow up with your clients?

Next Steps and Resources

In the second half of this chapter, we will focus on B2B Procurement Processes. Stay tuned to learn more about RFPs, and other things that Fernanda spoke about in her interview!

In the meantime, here are additional resources that we recommend you to dive into:

• ► This recording of a great workshop for social enterprises from the Social Impact Hub as part of their RISE program. You will hear from Joanne Kennett from Westpac’s Group Procurement and Partnerships team and Olivia Cozzolino from Social Traders.
• ► An interesting blog by Salesforce, who are a leading company selling software to manage sales: How to Build A Sales Process That Lands Deals Every Time
• ► Inbound marketing with Hubspot: how to develop a strategy to attract customers and land qualified leads.
• ► MovingWorlds start-up toolkit: here is a guide with templates on developing your sales process.
• ► And again, if you didn’t get the chance to join our past event in which Amadou Sanankoua, Founder and CEO of OnePoint Africa Group gave practical tips on how to create a Winning Sales Strategy, here is the recording.

Selling to larger organisations often involves going through a highly structured procurement process. While the process can be long and time-consuming, it can open up doors to large selling opportunities! In this chapter, we will provide a high-level overview of what to expect, along with tips to help you determine when it is worth submitting a bid, and increase your chances of winning the sale when you do.

Different ways that corporations make purchases

Procurement is the process that larger organisations use to identify potential suppliers. Every year, trillions of dollars are spent by global corporations to purchase products/services from other businesses via procurement channels. Recently, there has been a growing movement towards “social procurement” – in which corporations actively seek to do business with other entities (like social enterprises) that are themselves socially responsible. Companies like SAP, Unilever, IKEA, and more have already committed  billions of dollars to be spent with social enterprises via social procurement.

When it comes to the procurement process, organisations use different purchasing methods depending on the size, complexity, and urgency of the purchase. The three most common purchasing methods are small buys, direct awards, and competitive bids. Find an overview of each below:

Small Buys

Small buys are for relatively low-value purchases that do not require a complex process. There is usually a monetary threshold under which the small buy approach is used, which varies by organisation. The process is simplified to reduce administrative burden, often involving minimal paperwork and fewer approval steps.

Direct Awards

Direct awards occur when a contract is awarded to a single vendor without a competitive bidding process. It is used when there is a specific, unique need that only one vendor can fulfil. It often applies to proprietary products or services that are unique to a single supplier. Procurement teams in large companies often need to provide a strong justification for why competition is not feasible or necessary. Social impact could be a key differentiator.

Competitive Bids

Competitive bidding is a formal procurement process where multiple vendors are invited to submit bids to provide goods or services on a large scale. It involves detailed specifications, bid solicitation, evaluation criteria, and formal bid submission. It is often publicly advertised to ensure broad participation. Bids are evaluated based on predefined criteria such as cost, quality, and capability. The contract is awarded to the vendor that best meets the criteria, often providing the best value.

As explained at the start of this section, it involves significant administrative effort and resources. The remainder of this section will focus on this type of purchasing method.

When is it worth it to submit a competitive bid?

As mentioned above, competitive bidding for larger clients can be a very cumbersome process. It’s often highly structured, involving multiple channels and an extensive team.

For that reason, social enterprises should be selective about which bids to compete for. Entrepreneurs should begin with segmenting the market to prioritise high-value B2B customers, followed by a data-driven approach to identify the most promising leads. A well-defined sales pipeline, with clearly delineated stages from lead generation to closing deals, can help manage the flow of sales activities. Utilising the right systems to track interactions and analyse your sales performance can improve your efficiency and decision-making over time.

This is not a small task, and it can use up a lot of your team’s resources. Before deciding to submit a bid to a potential client, you first need to know whether you have a good chance of winning it. You can get some insight into your chances by asking yourself these questions:

• 👉 Are you solving the issue that the potential client is facing?
• 👉 Is your offer at the right price point for the client? Is this price point reasonable for your business?
• 👉 Do you have the required certifications?
• 👉 Are you able to provide the quantity or scale required within the timeframe?
• 👉 Is there a chance to continue working with this client beyond this one opportunity?

Another very important factor is whether you can find someone who can help you win the bid. You can better understand your chances by asking yourself questions like:

• ► Do you know who the decision maker is?
• ► Have you tailored your offer to their unique perspective?
• ► Who can help you stand out in front of this person?
• ► Is there an employee who has direct contact with the decision maker who can help make the case for why you are better than other bidders?
• ► Is there an NGO, intermediary, or certification body that can help build your credibility with the decision maker?

• ► Is there a value chain player that can put in a good word for you? For instance, to explain why they would benefit from working with you instead of someone else?

Different types of requests in the procurement process

Request for Information (RFI): An RFI is a preliminary step in the procurement process used to gather general information about potential suppliers and their capabilities. It is typically employed when an organisation is exploring options and needs to understand the market landscape, available products, and services.

Request for Proposal (RFP): An RFP is a detailed solicitation document used when an organisation seeks proposals from vendors for complex projects or services. It includes specific requirements, criteria for evaluation, and expectations for deliverables. The RFP process allows for thorough evaluation of each vendor’s approach and capabilities, facilitating the selection of the best-suited provider based on multiple factors, not just price.

Request for Quotation (RFQ): An RFQ is a formal request used to obtain price quotations for specific goods or services. It is typically used when the requirements are well-defined and the primary consideration is cost. Vendors respond with detailed pricing information, and the organisation evaluates these quotes to select the vendor offering the best price. The RFQ process is straightforward and is often used for procuring standardised products or services where the specifications are clear and there is little need for negotiation beyond price.

Common elements of a bid

When putting together your bid, here are the key components you should include:

• ✅ Title page: make sure you include all of the information requested by the soliciting organisation on your title page. Consider using  graphic design to make your title page, and bid, stand out

• ✅ Cover letter: highlight why your business can deliver competitively on quality and pricing, and add significant value through your social and community benefits

• ✅ Table of Contents (TOC): make it easy for the client to navigate your bid by including a table of contents, ensuring that headings and page numbers line up correctly

• ✅ Executive Summary: this is one of the most important components of your RFP, as it will help the buyer decide if they are interested enough to read more. It’s typically less personal than a cover letter, and is an opportunity to highlight the key points in your bid succinctly

• ✅ Company profile: don’t assume the buyer is already familiar with your brand. This section is your opportunity to tell the story about your business, how it came about, what your track record is, and highlight any awards you have received or major growth milestones achieved.Your company profile can be updated regularly and used repeatedly for many different bids. Buyers often do secondary research online, so ensure your social media and website are up to date as well.

• ✅ Summary of the understanding of the work: this is where you will demonstrate that you understand what the buyer’s key issues and project objectives are, while connecting the dots to how you can solve them.

• ✅ Proposed methodology or work plan: describe the steps you would take for completing the work, in detail. Chart out the project activities over the length of the project, broken down by month or week, along with key metrics and milestones.

Joint responses to requests

There might be cases in which opportunities are too large for you to bid on by yourself. In those cases, it can be interesting to look for joint responses/collaborations to increase your capacity and match the requirements of the bid.

Creating partnerships between social enterprises to present turn-key offers can enhance the value proposition for potential buyers by simplifying their purchasing process and offering comprehensive solutions.

👉 An example includes the partnership between various social enterprises at the Olympic Games in France, where companies like Carton Plein and Lemontri explored jointly bid to enhance their service range by combining expertise in areas like waste management and recycling logistics. To learn more about how the Olympic Games this year selected social enterprises as suppliers, read this insightful article.

Keep these tips in mind for a smooth collaboration in a joint bid:

• 📄 Create a detailed plan to help ensure that division of work is clear between collaborators and that things are done on time.
• 📆 Meet for regular review meetings to help ensure that each entity can share any concerns or updates.
• 🤝 Develop a joint marketing strategy to help present a seamless front to potential clients, emphasising the complementary nature of the services offered.
• 🗣 Establish a robust mechanism for conflict resolution to navigate challenges quickly and to establish metrics for evaluating the partnership’s performance.
• 🎯 Align on common goals and values to maintain a coherent and unified approach.
• 📢 Establish clear communication channels with partners and agree on roles and responsibilities to help avoid overlaps and gaps in service delivery.
• 👀 Allow for flexibility to adapt to changing client needs and market conditions.

Negotiating terms

When negotiating with larger companies, you need to clearly understand the contract terms. These normally include price, exit terms, and payment conditions.

You need to balance your approach between showing that you are flexible and want to win the big sale, while also making sure that you stick to your own business strategy and can remain profitable.

Negotiation can take a lot of time and energy. It is a delicate process which ultimately determines whether all of your previous work turns into a deal or not – which is why it’s very important to go into it prepared!

How to prepare for negotiation

When negotiating on price, it’s essential to conduct thorough market research to understand the fair value of your offering and be able to present a well-substantiated case for your pricepoint. Be open to discussing volume discounts or phased pricing structures that align with your financial goals and the scale of the larger company. Additionally, consider including clauses for periodic price reviews to adjust for market changes. Flexibility can also mean offering added value through additional services or extended support, ensuring your offer remains attractive without compromising your financial stability.

Negotiating on exit terms is key for securing your cash flow while safeguarding your interests. Think through potential scenarios that could cause the partnership to end prematurely, and clearly define exit terms to protect your intellectual property.

When negotiating on payment conditions, strive for terms that balance prompt cash flow with the larger company’s typical payment cycles. For instance, negotiating for partial upfront payments or milestone-based payments (vs. lump sum payment after delivery) can mitigate cash flow risks. Be firm about your limits, such as the minimum acceptable upfront payment or the maximum allowable payment delay, to prevent financial strain. In the following chapter, we’ll illustrate just how important this is using the example of Tiny Miracles: a social enterprise that negotiated its partnership with the brand Rituals in a way that allowed it to finance the production for 12 months, thanks to its pre-payment of orders.

By maintaining a clear understanding of your boundaries and being open to creative solutions, you can arrive at an agreement that is mutually beneficial to both buyer and supplier.

Best Practices

When you are ready to respond to an RFP, there are some best practices to keep in mind:

1. 👉 Make sure your proposal directly responds to the ask in the RFP. This is a time to convince the company that your solution responds to their direct need, it is not a time to sell an offer that is adjacent to their ask.

1. 👉 Submit the completed bid on time. For the sake of transparency, many organisations will not read your bid if it is submitted beyond the deadline provided.

1. 👉 Remember that the organisation will be evaluating your solution from both a bottom-line business perspective AND impact perspective. Impact alone is not enough to close the sale – you need to also meet the right quality and cost criteria. Keep this in mind as you prepare your budget.

1. 👉 Show the traction you have had with any other buyers, and include any signals that would help the organisation have trust in your capability to deliver the product or service. You will want to share other customers you have worked with, and any brand associations or certifications that could boost your credibility.

1. 👉 Follow the template provided by the requesting organisation and understand their evaluation criteria to prepare a winning bid. RFP reviews are very structured and points and decisions are awarded to organisations that follow the process and structure meticulously.

Checklist

Before you submit a bid, use this checklist to make sure you select the right opportunities, and approach them in the most effective way:

• ✔️ Does your solution address the needs of the organisation as outlined in the RFP/RFQ, and is there a high chance for you to win it?

• ✔️ Is this request one that you would have a better chance at winning by applying with another organisation in a joint bidding process?
• ✔️ Have you confirmed who the decision maker is, what their priorities are, and how the negotiating process might work?
• ✔️ Have you done thorough research on your buyer – the organisation and the individual decision maker(s)?
• ✔️ Have you analysed the company’s CSR/ESG report(s) to identify where your socially impactful solution can help achieve the buyer’s stated goals?
• ✔️ Have you customised your bid with the most relevant value proposition(s) based on the request?
• ✔️ Have you customised your bid with the most relevant case study and data based on the request?
• ✔️ Are you clear on what the negotiation terms might be, and what your limits are?
• Have you brainstormed a list of questions that you may be asked and that you want to ask?

Additional Resources

• ► How to find RFPs, the Guide from MovingWorlds.
• ► Here is the recording of a great workshop run by Social Impact Hub as part of their RISE program. They also talk about joint responses to requests that social enterprises can collaborate on.

Introduction to Impact Measurement and Management (IMM)

Why do you need IMM?

When measuring business progress, we tend to look at financial indicators such as profitability to see if we are on the right track. But for social enterprises, being able to measure impact using a double or triple-bottom-line approach (including social and/or environmental factors alongside financial returns) is equally important, and provides data points that are crucial for decision-making. This kind of holistic approach to impact measurement allows the founder, the team, customers and investors to evaluate the progress being made towards impact goals and provides data that informs strategy.

Particularly in the context of social procurement, your social and/or environmental impact is a big differentiator for your offering – and it is important to have easily available impact data that can be communicated externally to B2B clients.

Internally, impact indicators enable your team to validate whether the strategies they are executing are having the intended impact – and if not, how they might pivot to achieve the desired impact while mitigating any unintended negative consequences that could arise during implementation.

Impact Measurement and Management (IMM) and a robust Theory of Change can help your organisation measure what matters, take a data-driven approach to strategy, and avoid pitfalls. This gives your business a competitive advantage in three main ways:

1. 🚀 Ensuring Value for Your Customers: Your mission defines your business objectives, and is based on the needs identified by your customers. Measuring impact provides conclusive evidence that your activities are in fact advancing that mission.

2. The better you are at impact measurement, the quicker you can validate assumptions and tailor your approaches accordingly. In addition, corporate customers might need your data for traceability and legal requirements, and the quality of your data can be a decisive factor in choosing whether to work with you.

3. 📈 Improving Business Performance: Collecting impact data is just the beginning; you need to regularly analyse it. This allows you to adjust your approach promptly if you see that your interventions are not achieving the desired impact.  Because it enables rapid learning loops, IMM serves as a crucial business management tool.

3. 💰 Unlocking Financial Opportunities: Impact is more than just a buzzword; it’s a pivotal consideration for donors and investors. Robust and transparent non-financial indicators help ground the narrative about the impact you create in facts and evidence.

IMM is critical for companies procuring goods/services from social enterprises because it enables them to assess and exhibit the social, economic and environmental outcomes of their purchases. Part of your offering to a corporation is the ability to help them with their sustainability reporting. Understanding what your buyers care about, and including those metrics in your reporting, can help drive sales.

How to get started

MM might sound complex, but at its core, it’s about looking at the positive and negative aspects of your business and finding ways to enhance the good. Here are five simple steps to get started:

👉 Step 1: Build and Test Your Theory of Change. Developing a Theory of Change (ToC) requires laying out all assumptions and thinking about how your intervention leads to a specific social/environmental change. It explicitly connects the dots between your company’s plan, and expected results.

👉 Step 2: Choose Relevant Impact Metrics. A completed ToC outlines how your inputs and activities lead to outputs, business outcomes, and impact. Each step prescribes data points that validate performance.

👉 Step 3: Set Up Practical Measurement Systems. Once you have chosen your impact metrics, set up practical systems for routine data collection and analysis. This analysis is critical for decision-making and learning.

👉 Step 4: Align with Global Frameworks. Align your IMM efforts with global frameworks such as the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) or Global Impact Investing Network’sIRIS+ to ensure you’re speaking the global language of impact.

👉 Step 5: Continuous Improvement. Impact measurement is more than just numbers; it’s about examining how you’re doing and making continuous improvements. Impact is not a destination, but rather a goal to be pursued continuously.

Building your Theory of Change

What is a Theory of Change?

A ToC explains how the activities your business undertakes contribute to a chain of results that lead to the intended or observed impacts. Some common labels that your investors, peers, and evaluators might use include: results chain, logic model, program theory, outcome mapping, impact pathway and investment logic.

Creating your Theory of Change

Your ToC should be clear, logical, and comprehensive. To create it, write down the following key elements:

• ► Inputs: all the resources you need to perform your regular business activities – like people, tools, and money.

• ► Activities: all planned actions that use your inputs to generate output – like creating, selling, or delivering your offering.
• ► Outputs: the immediate results of your activities – like number of people reached, or products sold. In this section, you would include what you need to do to achieve your outcomes in the next section.
• ► Outcomes: changes in behaviour, attitudes, or conditions resulting from your outputs – like the positive results observed for the people you’re serving, or effects on the broader social problem you’re trying to solve.
• ► Impact: Here comes the impact! This refers to the broader, long-term change your social business seeks to achieve.
• ► Vision: The vision encapsulates the end goal of your activity – a world where you’ve achieved your mission fully, and that exists without the problem you are trying to solve!

Example: Sustainable Threads & Co

Let’s take the hypothetical example of a social enterprise in the textile industry: Sustainable Threads & Co. Here is the profile of the enterprise:

• ► Nature of Business: a hybrid model combining marketplace platform and direct sales to B2B buyers
• ► Target customers: companies (e.g. retail brands, corporate entities, hospitality companies) looking for sustainable and ethically source textile products
• ► Products: handmade textiles, including fabrics, garments, and home decor items, produced using sustainable materials and fair trade practices
• ► Value proposition: For B2B buyers: high-quality, sustainable textiles with traceable supply chains and fair trade certification, enhancing the buyer’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sustainability credentials.
• For producers (local communities): access to fair wages, capacity building, and support in maintaining traditional crafts, thus contributing to local and community development
• ►Revenue streams:Sales of textiles directly to B2B buyers, Marketplace fees from other sustainable textile producers listed on their platform

And this is what their Theory of Change would look like:

When complete, your ToC will be a written statement that you can include in your reports, website, and pitches. Remember, iteration is key! Your ToC should be a living document that you reference often. Keep these tips in mind:

✅ Make sure that there is a logical framework that demonstrates the cause-and-effect relationships among the elements in your ToC. A good exercise is to work backwards: can you link your outcome to your inputs the other way around?

✅ You should also keep testing your assumptions: Once data has been gathered, use it to evaluate the validity of each assumption.

Choosing relevant Impact Metrics

What indicators are important to you?

The core of the social enterprise model is based on the concept that as your revenue increases, so does your ability to make a meaningful impact. The indicators that measure your impact are just as vital as the indicators that measure your business’ financial success. Impact metrics, which are essentially impact key performance indicators (KPIs), must be:

• 📈 Measurable values that track your organisation’s progress towards its goals.
• 🌱Both quantitative (numbers-based) and qualitative (language-based). Numbers show improvement over time and help us see trends, but they are not enough to tell a complete story on their own.
• 👣  Clear, accountable, and transparent to stakeholders.

Tip: Revisit the strategy tools we introduced in Chapter 1 “Creating a Winning B2B Growth Plan”, to help you develop your goals. Your goals are essentially the target impact indicators that you want to achieve. They should be expressed in the  same units you are measuring them with, and should follow the same SMART framework (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.)

To choose your impact indicators, go back to your ToC and quantify each of its elements. How can you measure your inputs/activities/outputs/outcomes/vision?

Next, identify data sources to determine where your data will originate. Go back to the data that you have available: the number of people that you are in contact with, surveys that you have organised with your community, your electricity bills, etc.

When possible, present metrics in terms of  the improvement that you have achieved. This is an easy concept for your audience to understand, and shows your commitment to continuous improvement. Examples include:

• ► Number of beneficiaries supported
• ► % income increase in a specific community
• ► Kg of waste reduction achieved in a specific time period

👉 You can download and use this Impact Measurement Practical workbook to identify your relevant impact indicators.

Linking indicators to existing sustainability standards

Don’t lose sight of your intended audience (potential B2B clients) when developing your ToC and choosing your indicators.

Tip: Revisit Chapter 2.2 “Identifying and knowing your clients” for a refresher on the specific needs your target buyer persona is trying to address, and how your impact helps them achieve their goals.

Select your metrics based on what matters to your target corporate buyer, their sustainability and reputational goals. Link your metrics to the certifications that they might ask you to earn to be able to work with them within their risk management framework. What indicators do those certifications ask you to manage?

Follow these steps as you start measuring impact:

• 👉 Make sure you start with a clear data collection plan that outlines which metrics you’ll track, and how. This can be a simple Excel workbook, and should include details that are critical for data collection such as sources of verification (internal or external), frequency of collection, and who from your team will be responsible for reporting this data.
• 👉 Collect baseline metrics to know where you are starting from. These initial metrics will be your baseline for showing improvement over time.
• 👉 Ensure that the data collection is continuous and consistent, and gathers all the necessary information.

• 👉 Analyse data at regular time intervals to gain insights on your performance.
• 👉 Compare your results against goals and objectives in your ToC, monitor your progress, and iterate as required.
• 👉 Develop consistent sharing of findings with both internal and external stakeholders to drive accountability.
• 👉 Use insights from measurement to make informed decisions and adjust strategies.
• 👉 Align your measurement approach to globally recognised frameworks, like the UN SDGs, the IRIS+ system or other reporting standards (such as the GRI), outlined in Chapter 2.2.
• 👉 Consider third party evaluations and audits to understand the last-mile impact of your stakeholders.

Certifications

Certifications give you credibility in the eyes of potential customers. Check what certifications your B2B customers require as part of their risk management approach, and consider whether pursuing additional certifications could help enhance your offering.

Regardless of which certification(s) you choose to pursue, a strong data collection plan will be the base of your certification process.

We have developed a list of certifications here, that includes an overview of what the certification covers and a comparison.

Case Study: Interview with Boris Gamarra from Recidar

• Boris Gamarra
• CEO and Head of Operations

To see what this theory looks like in practice, let’s look at a real-world example. We recently had the opportunity to interview Borris Gamarra, CEO and head of Operations, from Recidar, a social enterprise that collects unused objects to give them a second life. Since 2015, they have been mitigating environmental pollution and creating purchasing opportunities for low-income families through its eco-social markets. Here’s what we learnt from him:

What is the problem that your social enterprise is solving?

• In Peru, an average of over 21,000 tons of waste is generated daily, of which only 2% is recycled. The city of Lima alone generates approximately 50% of the total waste. Furthermore, poverty in Peru continues to increase rather than decrease, with 29% of the Peruvian population living in poverty. As a result, many people are forced to shop in informal markets, commonly known as “cachinas,” where the primary supply comes from the trafficking of stolen objects.

What is your environmental impact, and how do you measure it?

• With our reverse logic system, we have extended the useful life of over 1 million unused objects, prevented more than 2,000 tons of waste from ending up in landfills, and mitigated over 17,000 tons of CO2.

• 76% of customers are aware that their purchases positively impact the environment. Quotes from our customers include: “The bazaar recycles and reuses, giving new life to things.” and  “Before, there were many discarded furniture pieces on the street. Here, they’re given a chance.”

What is your social impact and how do you measure it?

• We have created a community space through our two eco-social markets, which attract an average of 3,500 visitors each month. On average, 90% of customers believe that the service in the markets is good or very good.

• One customer in Chorrillos said “It’s a nice experience; people rush to buy, there’s friendliness, one de-stresses choosing their product, and people know each other. There used to be problems, but now that has changed. Before, different types of people would come, take merchandise, leave it behind, and take what they needed. In the market, I would highlight the order; it’s a more comfortable shopping experience. It’s all about talking. Now that’s decreased; we know each other, we talk, we joke; people know each other.”

• 96% of our customers believe the market offers economic advantages and access to essential goods for low-income individuals. Another customer in VES said “Because it helps acquire products; money doesn’t stretch. There are humble people with no fixed salary living on 20 soles a day. I bought a sofa for 35 soles, and now I have somewhere to sit. It helps us.”

How do you work with corporate clients?

• Since 2021, we have created Empresas 2s: Solidarity and Sustainability, so that all our corporate partners can be part of a community striving to create a more circular, inclusive, and supportive world. Our services include:

• Conscious Reuse Campaigns: We conduct campaigns that raise awareness among employees, customers, and students of various organisations about Circular Economy, in addition to scheduling free pickups at their homes or setting up collection points at their facilities. At the end of the campaigns, we provide impact indicators to demonstrate how easy it is to generate social and environmental impact.

• Responsible Inventory Disposal: Our reverse logistics services enable companies to consciously dispose of unused furniture, decommissioned inventories, and objects that have lost their commercial value in a way that supports their sustainable development goals.

• Visits to Recidar’s Workshops/Markets and Volunteering: Various companies, universities, and associations visit our facilities, where we exchange experiences about the circular economy and allow them to explore our markets, workshops, and warehouses. We also have a volunteer program where allies-for-a-day can be part of our operations or engage in fun and educational activities in our eco-social markets.

• Logistical Treatment of Objects: We provide logistics services for companies (transport, storage, and extending the life of objects to create social impact), which help fund our markets.

• Social Projects: Through corporate financing, we create social projects in communities where we can conduct initiatives against cold weather, recover public spaces, and provide training on recycling and reuse.

How do you track your impact?

• Currently, the operations team is responsible for recording the number of items received by category and their average weights, so that later, with a conversion ratio, we can obtain the CO2 mitigation value and the positive impact achieved by not having to create a new product. This conversion data was provided by the consulting firm Libelula. Social indicators are obtained through an anthropological study conducted annually.

How did you select your key performance indicators (KPIs) and certifications?

• Given the reverse logistics service, it was essential to convey the carbon footprint being mitigated by not creating a new product (currently, we are the only ones in the Peruvian market providing this information). Additionally, to ensure that the eco-social markets were fulfilling their value proposition, we decided to start conducting these studies with external consultants. The B Corporation certification was also fundamental for us since the concept of a social enterprise was not well-known in the country when Recidar started. The market mainly had welfare projects relying on external financing rather than self-sustainable support projects. This certification helped validate our business model and raise awareness of the positive impact we generate among our partners.

How does measuring your impact benefit your corporate clients? What metrics/indicators do you provide, and how do you help track and communicate your own impact?

• Our partners benefit from impact measurement as we are the only ones in the market providing this information, helping them in their plans related to the SDGs and ISO certification.

• We provide metrics for reused items, kg avoided in landfills, and CO2 mitigated, along with an annual summary of social impact. We consistently communicate these figures across our various channels to improve visibility and reach regarding what we are achieving together.

Any advice for other social entrepreneurs starting their B2B journey who want to develop strong impact measurement and management?

• Measuring Recidar’s impact and beginning to share it with partners allowed for a 100% growth in corporate allies in its first year, demonstrating the importance of clarity that the model is functioning at both social and environmental levels. However, it must be aligned with each organisation’s goals and based in an understanding of what can be measured and what cannot.

• Boris Gamarra, CEO & Head of Operations

Checklist

IMM is not something that has  a distinct ‘start’ and ‘end’, you need to keep re-evaluating it, similarly to the strategy review process. Ask yourself these questions:

• ✔️Is my ToC clear and impactful, including all listed elements?

• ✔️ Are my impact metrics relevant?

• ✔️ Am I clear on the needs of our buying persona(s)?
• ✔️ How does our data help potential buyers achieve their sustainability goals?
• ✔️ Am I  connecting what we’re  measuring to the type of data that potential buyers need?
• ✔️ Are my activities creating  the impact that I wanted to have?
• ✔️ What should I adjust?

Additional Resources

• ► The YSB Practical Workbook to Impact Measurement and Management to follow each step we just described.
• ► Changeroo Tool that allows you to create a living theory of change
• ► GIIN’s IRIS+ System: GIIN IRIS+
• ► Social Value International’s SROI Guide
• ► Hivos ToC Guidebook

Best Practices for Impact Measurement & Management

with Manasi Parvatikar, Impact Measurement and Management Lead at Yunus Social Business

Manasi Parvatikar, IMM Global Manager at Yunus Social Business, reveals the fundamentals of impact measurement and management. In this practical webinar, she provides tools and information to craft a robust Theory of Change, select relevant impact indicators, and align your activities with global sustainable development principles.

Watch here

Taking advantage of communication tools to drive B2B sales

We live in a world where it is possible to become visible and capture attention (even with little to no budget) thanks to digital media tools. The key to doing this successfully is communicating a clear brand strategy, and tailoring your message based on your B2B audience. Investing in branding will help you get discovered by your ideal buyers, and will bring them into your sales funnel with minimal effort. Importantly, this investment will also help you establish the messaging templates and guidance you and your team need to communicate consistent messages in sales and marketing materials.

Building a strong brand

In all of our chapters so far, we have discussed the importance of understanding your audience — from your ideal customer persona(s) and their needs to the sustainability issues they face and how you might help solve them. Understanding your audience is key in the ​​development of your communication strategy as well: you need to make sure that you know who you are communicating to, and what will attract their attention.

To develop a strong brand, you need to develop brand positioning based on your offering and your target buyers. Your brand’s positioning is what differentiates your social enterprise from all the rest, and clarifies its unique value. Clearly articulate why your organisation is necessary, and what sets it apart from others with similar offerings. Make sure that you tell your story as it is – the ups and down – most of the time, your journey is the most powerful story you can use to explain your challenges, and how you overcame them to drive results.

Your company’s brand personality humanises your communications through characteristics like sincerity and inclusivity, inviting connection with your audience. Your tone of voice is the practical expression of this personality in all communications.

Typically a brand positioning strategy would include the following elements:

1. 📍 Brand positioning vis-à-vis the competitors
3. ☘️ Company values
5. 💡 Brand personality
7. 🗝️  Value proposition and customer benefits
9. 💪🏼 Brand attributes

The brand positioning will help you determine the audience you want to target, the type of messaging that will resonate with them, and how you plan to reach them. Creating brand-building content  for that audience will help you drive inbound leads, and make your sales process easier. It is much easier to make a sale from a brand that people have already heard of, as it builds an element of credibility and trust.

Creating your communication and branding strategy

An effective social enterprise branding and communication strategy combines various elements to define its identity. Remember: it is essential that you choose the right variables for your audience!

Here are typical components of a branding strategy:

1. 👉Build your brand identity: this is based on your positioning and the audience you are targeting.
3. 👉Develop your brand story: clearly communicate what makes your organisation unique (see below for additional guidance on storytelling).
5. 👉Develop branding guidelines: this document will need to be updated anytime you make changes to the logo, typography, colour scheme, etc.
7. 👉Create a branding kit: you want to have consistency in visual and written messages across all company documents.

Once you have clear brand positioning, you will want to focus on communicating it to your target audience.

💬 Overarching Message

• Your brand messaging encompasses your mission, vision, and values, expressed through taglines or a comprehensive brand story. Ensure your message reflects your programs, benefits, and overall style, and consider creating an elevator pitch to summarise your core message effectively.

📸 Pictures, videos, and visuals

• Use what is readily available! Videos and pictures can help you show the behind-the-scenes reality of your work without having to spend much money. Make sure that you elevate your employees and show their powerful stories, and tell stories about your customers and stakeholders in a human-centered way. Remember: language and imagery have the power to reinforce or deconstruct systems of power that maintain poverty, inequality and suffering. Make sure that you are sharing these stories in an empowering way.

📢 Platforms and channels

• Make sure that you pick the right platform for the right audience. LinkedIn is used by professionals the most, Instagram is extremely powerful in telling impact and sustainability stories, and Facebook remains extremely strong in some areas of the world. Look at what platform your potential customer is using, and build your presence there!

🗣 Inbound marketing on a budget

• Branding and storytelling are essential to driving inbound sales: when customers approach businesses to purchase products or services. You need to stand out, in a way that will capture your customer’s interest to the point of asking for a product or service.

The good news for social entrepreneurs is that your options are no longer limited to traditional communications in the form of paid media. Social media, if done right, on the right channels, can be a very strong tool to connect you with potential customers even if you have a limited budget. Thanks to the social media revolution, we now have access to new inbound marketing options and cheaper outbound marketing options, such as social media ads, Google ads, targeted campaigns, etc. These can have a wide range of costs, and are mostly useful when searching for new buyers who have never heard of your offering.

Here are some of the virtually free forms of media that can help you get your message out there:

• 👉Earned media is publicity gained from word of mouth, online reviews, and blogger, press, or influencer relations.
• 👉Owned media is content that you have created, including blog posts, whitepapers, videos, podcasts, case studies, and your website.
• 👉Shared media: one of the most popular and cost-effective channels for PR, this includes posts on social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram.

To drive inbound sales, you will want to communicate with your audience in order to:

• ✅ Promote yourself as a thought leader
• ✅ Gain positive publicity and visibility around your offering and impact
• ✅ Build trust and a reputation as a serious brand

How to win at storytelling

Powerful storytelling can transform your marketing. It starts with understanding your audience and ensuring you are telling your story in a way that resonates with them. Find the core issue your audience is facing and build your stories around that.

Remember that marketing goes beyond the product or service you sell: it’s about stories that can be shared. In the case of social enterprises, telling the story of the impact you’re creating is paramount. The art of storytelling is very specific, and we are thrilled to share some insights from our upcoming workshop with branding expert Sophie Lee, the founder and director of Electric Peach B Corp. According to Sophie, the elements that make a good story are:

• ► An identifiable character: Include a specific person or group of people the audience can identify and connect with.
• ► Authentic emotion: Include the emotions the character experiences.
• ► A particular moment: Happens at a specific moment in place and time.
• ► A specific detail: Include specific details the audience can visualise or sense in some way. Motion and sensory words bring the story to life.

We also recommend you to follow the Seven Step Story Framework below, developed by Electric Peach. And if you want to get more valuable tips from Sophie Lee, watch the recording of the workshop on “Growing your impact-driven brand through Storytelling.”

Case Study: Interview with Tiny Miracles

Sid Menon

Chief Creative Activist

Tiny Miracles is a social enterprise on a mission to create a slightly more just world. They do this by attempting to create confident, liberated communities who can access the global market and participate in it with dignity. They work with brands and companies who want to put social impact on the agenda by socially procuring their products.

We recently had the pleasure of interviewing Sid Menon, Tiny Miracles’ Chief Creative Activist, to learn more about the role of branding and storytelling in its B2B sales journey. Check out the inspiring insights that Sid shared with us below!

Can you tell us about Tiny Miracles’ work, and your B2B journey?

• Tiny Miracles started as a foundation when Laurien Meuter, Founder, realised that providing education for children wasn’t enough to alleviate poverty because parents needed jobs to support them. If parents don’t have a stable income, they tend to keep their kids out of school to help them raise money for the family. Therefore, education and employment are intrinsically connected. This led to the creation of a social enterprise to employ parents as a means to uplift communities.

• Initially, we designed products sold on a small scale to museums, which didn’t provide stable income. In 2010, Laurien approached cosmetics and lifestyle company, Rituals. She presented her case to the founder and CEO, Raymond Cloosterman, and convinced him to become a donor of Tiny Miracles. That is how the partnership with Rituals first began.

• Four years later, Laurien sent Raymond a memorable text message – “We don’t need a donor, we need a customer.” Laurien and her team had realised that the need for parents, especially women, in the community was to secure stable jobs in order to achieve financial independence. To be able to employ them, they decided to shift from a foundation model to a social enterprise model.

• It really helps to have a first strong client. Rituals transitioned from a donor to a client, marking the start of our B2B journey. This year, Rituals ordered 2 million bags, and their involvement has helped us gain traction with other businesses by showcasing the value of our partnership. ​​Rituals is not only purchasing a product, they’re purchasing an impact story.

• Tiny Miracles is now present in 9 communities across Mumbai, affecting the lives of more than 3,000 actively engaged community members. Apart from providing dignified well-paid work, Tiny Miracles also has innovative impact programs that help community members empower themselves. Other clients now include Heineken and Tony’s chocolate.

How did you build your brand and storytelling?

• We shifted towards a storytelling approach about a couple of years ago, understanding that brands like Rituals were buying not just a product, but the story behind it. We aim to craft a simple, honest narrative that resonates with end customers, making them feel a connection to the larger cause when they touch our products.

We had a look at your different channels (website, LinkedIn, Instagram..) and your branding looks amazing. How did you decide to build such a colourful and visual brand?

• In January 2023, I joined the company with my background in brand consulting. The first thing I did was think about the question, ‘why would a company buy from us?’ We realised that while impact is important, it is not enough on its own. Brands buy a product, but also need a compelling product with a compelling story behind it.

• We decided to differentiate ourselves with our storytelling. We aim to be a globally recognised brand, advocating for a more just world. Our branding reflects this activism and is consistent across all platforms.

• It’s not easy, to be honest. People working here frequently ask me to tone it down when we’re talking to high end fashion brands. But my feeling – and I might be in a minority here – is that a good brand is like a person, you don’t change it based on who you’re talking to.

Do you think powerful branding is important when working B2B?

• Yes, powerful branding is crucial. If you don’t tell the story of your impact, you cannot ask for the premium that finances your impact. It helps convey the impact story effectively, which is often something B2B clients are looking for.

• In this world, companies do something because they have a problem to solve. Branding helps your business partner tell your story, which is one of the reasons why they buy from you in the first place.

• When we pitch to clients, we use our imagery but adapt it every time to the customer’s branding and visual identity. We show them how it could look in their store, or how they could communicate about it, playing with their existing colours and logos. This approach, along with showcasing strong existing partners such as Rituals, helps build trust and emphasises our impact.

Do you have any tips on the types of channels you use for communication?

• LinkedIn is my least favourite social media platform but it is one of the most important channels for B2B sales, and we would like to be more active on it than we are today. It allows direct communication with senior partners and business leaders, and is also the most leveraged channel by brands. Companies love to tell their peers what they are currently doing, especially when it comes to impact.

• And it is important to adapt your strategy according to the channel: for instance, on Instagram, it works well to have carousel posts, which generate significant interest. We noticed that a written post may not be seen by everyone. But what is most important is the feeling it triggers to the few people who see it. The goal is not just broad visibility but meaningful engagement.

Are impact reporting and transparency as important as branding? How do you ensure your impact is well understood and shared as a story?

• It depends on the industry, but often impact reporting is as important as branding. It’s a key part of our story and essential for social enterprises to convey the full scope of their impact.

• We align our impact metrics with our brand narrative. We use specific measures like the “better than yesterday” index to gauge our impact or the number of people employed, trained, etc. Clients are of course eager to receive those metrics and share them themselves.

How do you tell stories about your impact in a way that challenges rather than perpetuates stereotypes?

• There is a certain joy that people feel when they feel seen. We like to focus on that joy and the sense of empowerment it creates in our communications.

• For example, we did a shoot a few months ago called ‘The Sassy Women of Tiny Miracles’. The only point was to show how sassy and cool these women we work with are. We’re not interested in showcasing misery or attempting to elicit pity. These are strong powerful women who don’t need a handout, they just need a fair shot at life. That’s the point of our portrayals in communication.

Any general tips for other social entrepreneurs?

• My biggest advice is radical honesty. Be true to yourself. Let me give you an example:

• Recently, we created toolkit boxes for the women who cannot leave their homes for work in Mumbai, India. They would come once a week to one of our centers in the city, pick it up, then work from home and deliver what they had crafted the week after. We put in a lot of effort to personalise these boxes to their daily realities and to create joy and excitement when they will open them. For example, we included encouragement posters and stickers and scorecards, among other things.

• This probably doesn’t qualify as ‘impact’. But not everything can be measured. Our branding and design aren’t only for the brands and end customers. We also always make sure to create joy for the community. And we just did it for them, not for the story.

• But involuntarily it became a piece of the story. Some clients like Rituals heard about it and really liked this initiative. It shows how sometimes you don’t even know where the story will come from. And you should never try too hard, you should be authentic and the rest will follow.

• Sid Menon, Chief Creative Activist at Tiny Miracles

Checklist

• ✔️ Have you done extensive research on your target audience?
• ✔️ Have you thought about your communications strategy, and all of the elements that should be included?
• ✔️ Are you including important impact indicators from your IMM?
• ✔️ Are you telling your story in an engaging way, through the seven steps framework?
• ✔️ Are you using powerful pictures and videos to show your efforts behind the scenes?

Additional Resources

• ►Sprout Social blog post: 11 social media trends you need to know in 2024
• ►Hubspot blog: Brand positioning
• ►Hootsuite resources: Case studies
• ►MovingWorlds Guide: Branding and Positioning
• ►Non-profit branding guideline
• ►B2B PR Essentials
• ►Mighty Ally 4 A’s Framework

👉 Branding Bootcamp Discount

We have spoken to Anne at Brand the Change, who has kindly offered us a discount for the social entrepreneurs in our network, on her Brand Bootcamp – Maximize Your Funding with Four A’s in 40 days.

Brand Bootcamp is a self-paced, online video course from Mighty Ally. We’ll guide you to boost your internal communications capacity, which will boost your funding.

Use the code MIGHTY300 at checkout to take $100 off the price.

Growing your impact-driven brand through Storytelling

with Sophie Lee, Founder of Electric Peach

Discover the potential of impact storytelling through hands-on insights by brand strategist Sophie Lee, Founder of Electric Peach. Sophie discusses how to drive effective storytelling strategies and how to emotionally connect with your audience to grow your business.

Watch here

Up to now, we have covered the sales journey from developing a sales strategy, understanding the sales cycle, to developing a system to capture and communicate on impact metrics that responds to corporate sustainability requirements in order to increase your chance of winning a deal.

Now that we have covered what the B2B journey looks like externally, we will now focus on sales execution and what you need to have in place to set your organisation up to be a successful B2B player. In this first part of the chapter, we will cover sales execution and we will then focus on building your pipeline and nailing your pitch.

Sales execution is about mastering the art of working through your sales funnel in an efficient manner. We will be covering the sales funnel and how to improve the conversion rate and time to convert a qualified lead into a customer in the second part of this chapter. Here we want to provide an overview of the sales techniques, tools, people, and metrics that come into play.

Let’s dive in!

Building a sales team

Who should be the first salesperson you hire?

Yourself. You are and will always be the best salesperson your company can have. As the founder of a company, you hold the initial mission, vision and values which you based the entire company on.

Maybe you created your business to solve an initial problem that you had, in which case you can attest to the value the solution brought you and your story can serve as a case study or overall storyline for your sales pitch – something we’ll discuss in greater detail later in the chapter.

Remember that part of sales at the early stage is understanding the customer’s needs and iterating. In delegating this role too early, you may miss insights and opportunities to improve your offering and retain your customers. With that said, once you have your product-market fit in place for B2B customers, you will want to start building a team to drive sales and expand into new segments.

You should not hire a first salesperson until you have been able to run a repeatable sales process first.

Different types of sales team roles

Sales teams often have multiple different roles and functions. The person doing the outreach is not necessarily the one that will talk to the prospect or close the deal. Let’s breakdown the different roles and their responsibilities:

• 👤 Sales Development Representative (SDR) / Business Development Representative (BDR)
• Responsible for generating and qualifying leads through outreach efforts to pass onto account executives. SDRs and and BDRs are usually the ones that prospects first interact with. He/she reaches out to potential clients and once they receive confirmation of interest they decide which ones are most likely to convert into paying clients.

• 👤 Account Executive (AE)
• Focuses on engaging qualified leads, delivering presentations, and closing deals to drive revenue. AEs are usually the ones who conduct demos for products or handle initial prospect meetings to show potential clients how they can benefit from your product or service.

• 👤 Sales Manager
• They lead and manage the entire sales team, setting targets, providing coaching, and ensuring the team meets performance goals. They’re usually not on the front lines, but behind the scenes.

• 👤 Customer Success Manager (CSM)
• Ensures customer satisfaction and retention by supporting post-sales relationships and driving product adoption. They will be in constant communication with the clients to check in on mission progress and to make sure the client is happy with the way things are working. If there are any problems, the CSM finds solutions.

• 👤 Sales Operations
• As teams expand, this role helps all team members effectively use tools, analyse data, create reports for the Sales Manager as well as the AEs, and work across the team to create more effective sales processes with dashboards, meetings, and overall general management.

• As the founder, you are the first sales person your company will have and that means that you will juggle all of the roles and responsibilities at the same time. It might sound scary, but don’t be afraid, it will come naturally as you believe in the product or service you are selling and will be the best person to convince a potential client of the value of your offer.

• Though you probably won’t need to hire an entire sales team in the beginning, it’s important to understand the different roles so that when you are looking to bring on a dedicated sales person, you can clearly define their responsibilities and set expectations to cover as many of these duties as possible.

Sales Techniques

Sales teams are not as effective without techniques and processes to drive repeatable sales and efficiency. Let’s start by exploring the different techniques and processes that you can use to drive sales for your business.

What are sales techniques or processes?

Sales techniques and processes are the tools that help you build a lean and results driven sales execution machine. Though they are different components of an overall sales strategy they are used together by sales teams to drive success. Let’s define them and see how they function together.

The most popular sales techniques are:

• 👉 Solution Selling focuses on how your product or service provides a solution to solve a specific problem.
• 👉 The Challenger Sales Model encourages your team to challenge prospects’ thinking and provide new insights.

Some well known processes are:

• 👉 The AIDA Model (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) helps in crafting compelling pitches that move prospects through stages of engagement.
• 👉 The SPIN Selling technique (Situation, Problem, Implication, Need-Payoff) is useful for uncovering and addressing the deeper needs of your clients.

You can think of processes as providing the “what” (the steps), and techniques as providing the “how” (the skills to execute those steps). Together, they create a powerful combination for sales success.

Inbound versus Outbound Sales

We’ve previously talked about inbound versus outbound sales so let’s just briefly define them before moving on to examples.

As described in Chapter 3, inbound sales occur when a customer hears about your product or service and reaches out to you directly to learn more. For example, you write a blog post about and readers who find the content valuable reach out to you to learn more about your offering.

In contrast, outbound sales focuses on direct outreach to a customer who has not yet expressed interest in a product or service offered by your business.

👉 To put it simply, inbound sales happen when the customer comes to you and outbound sales happen when you go to them. Both strategies have their place, and there is no right or wrong approach. In the beginning of any company’s journey, their sales will be primarily led by outbound sales because inbound sales take time to successfully develop.

What do inbound and outbound sales look like?

Let’s look at both outbound and inbound examples.

Some examples of inbound sales are:

• 📸 Content Marketing: Creating valuable blog posts, articles, videos, or guides that address prospects’ pain points and attract them to your website.
• 🚀 SEO (Search Engine Optimisation): Optimising your website and content to rank higher in search engine results, driving organic traffic.
• 🗣 Social Media Marketing: Sharing engaging content on social media platforms to attract followers and encourage interactions.
• 📩 Email Marketing: Sending newsletters, product updates, and promotional emails to nurture leads and keep them engaged.
• 👂 Referral Programs: Encouraging existing customers to refer new prospects through word-of-mouth or incentivised programs.

Some examples of outbound sales are:

• 📞 Cold Calling: Direct phone outreach to introduce your product or service to prospects.
• 📩 Cold Emailing: Sending personalised emails to potential leads to spark interest.
• 📤 LinkedIn Outreach: Building relationships and generating leads through personalised messages on LinkedIn.
• 🏬 Networking at Events: Attending industry events, conferences, or trade shows to meet potential clients and partners.
• 🚪 Door-to-Door Sales: Visiting businesses or clients in person to pitch your product or service.

Given that outbound sales can require more financial and resources in time, you will want to develop an outreach plan that focuses on the customers that you have the highest likelihood of converting. These are the customer segments you would have identified earlier.

Sales tools and Metrics

Now that you have the sales team structure and processes down, let’s discuss sales tools.

As all tools, sales tools can help streamline your processes making outreach and tracking much easier.

Common sales tools

• 👉 Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software: Manages customer interactions, tracks sales activities, and maintains contact information (Salesforce, HubSpot).
• 👉 Sales Automation Tools: Automates repetitive tasks such as sending follow-up emails, scheduling meetings, and tracking leads (Outreach, Salesloft).
• 👉Lead Generation Tools: Identifies and generates potential leads from various sources (LinkedIn Sales Navigator).
• 👉Sales Analytics and Reporting: Provides insights and reports on sales performance, metrics, and trends (Tableau, Looker Studio).
• 👉Customer Success Tools: Helps manage and improve post-sale customer relationships and support (Zendesk).

Using these tools can be beneficial to your operations but they aren’t always affordable. You can always use Excel or Google Sheets to track your metrics manually and you can even turn them into a dashboard (watch this video to see how).

If you are planning on using sales tools, you shouldn’t do so until you have mastered manual data collection and learned about the different kinds of metrics.

Knowing if your sales strategy is working is only possible by following metrics. Metrics allow you to make informed and data based decisions about your strategy and operations. These metrics will tell you how your sales process is doing and which aspects of it need to improve.

Key metrics

Let’s breakdown some of the sales metrics you should track:

• ✅ Leads Generated: Total number of new leads.
• ✅ Lead Conversion Rate: Percentage of leads converted to paying customers.
• ✅ Sales Cycle Length: Average time to close a deal from first interaction to when the contract is signed.
• ✅ Average Deal Size: Average revenue per closed deal.
• ✅ Monthly Revenue: Total revenue generated each month.
• ✅ Customer Retention Rate: Percentage of retained customers.
• ✅ Customer Satisfaction: Satisfaction score from customers.
• ✅ Sales Activities: Number of calls/emails and meetings/demos conducted.
• ✅ Cost per Acquisition (CPA): Average cost to acquire an additional customer.

Sales enablement content

Sales enablement content refers to materials and resources that are designed to support and empower sales teams throughout the sales process. The goal of this content is to equip sales representatives with the tools and information they need to effectively engage prospects, close deals, and drive revenue.

Key types of sales enablement content include:

• 👉 Sales Playbooks: Guides that outline sales strategies, processes, best practices, and techniques for different stages of the sales cycle. Use this guide with provided examples to help you build your own sales playbook.
• 👉 Product Sheets and Brochures: Documents that provide detailed information about products or services, including features, benefits, and specifications. Here are tips and templates to help you craft an eye-catching  product sheet.
• 👉 Case Studies and Success Stories: Real-world examples demonstrating how your product or service has successfully addressed customer needs and delivered results. Download these case study templates to showcase your past wins.
• 👉 Sales Presentations: Slide decks and visual aids used during meetings or pitches to communicate key messages and value propositions. Draw inspiration from these 10 sales presentations.
• 👉 Training Materials: Educational resources such as videos, webinars, and e-learning modules that help sales reps improve their skills and knowledge. You can use LinkedIn learning to get tips and tricks from leading industry professionals.
• 👉 Email Templates and Call Scripts: Pre-written messages and scripts to guide sales reps in their outreach efforts and ensure consistent communication. Read this HubSpot article for email templates and this one for call scripts.
• 👉 Demo and Trial Guides: Instructions and resources to help sales reps conduct product demonstrations and trials effectively. Here are some examples of successful demos.
• 👉 Customer Personas: Profiles that outline key characteristics, needs, and pain points of different customer segments to tailor sales approaches. Build your own personas using this HubSpot guide.

Different types of content are beneficial at different steps of the sales process, this is something we’ll discuss later in the chapter.

Checklist

We covered a lot of material in this section so let’s make sure we remember the main ideas:

• ✔️ Why are you the best salesperson for your business?
• ✔️ What is the primary purpose of a sales team beyond making sales?
• ✔️ What tools and methods can a sales team use to collaborate effectively? Do you plan on incorporating any of these into your sales process?
• ✔️ Why is it important to measure sales metrics? How do you plan to measure your metrics?
• ✔️ Which sales techniques and processes that we mentioned do you plan on implementing?
• ✔️ What type of sales enablement content do you already have? Which will you create?
• ✔️ What outbound sales actions do you plan on using?

Additional Resources

1. ► Learn more about Sales Methodologies by reading this HubSpot blog.
3. ►Take a deeper look at Sales Metrics and how to calculate them by reading this HubSpot blog.
5. ► Learn more about Sales Enablement content and how you can create it by reading the SEC blog and watching the YouTube video linked here.
7. ► Deepen your knowledge of Inbound and Outbound sales by learning more from Salesforce.
9. ► Cold emailing can be difficult, use this blog to help you create cold emails more likely to get responses.
11. ► If you want to become experts and have formal training on these topics, check out HubSpot Academy and LinkedIn Learning.
13. ► Dive into the Moving World’s B2B Sales Guide

Sell like a Champion

with Anine Ward, Consultant & B2B Expert

Learn how to save time, energy, and resources with a targeted approach on the right buyers. Anine Ward, Senior Client Partner- Enterprise at Andela, dives into sales execution and how to sell efficiently.

Watch Here

Building a sales pipeline is about getting people interested in your business and converting them into paying customers. The conversion process in B2B sales has many steps and multiple interactions between you and potential clients. Building a strong pipeline can help you track your potential clients and see where they are in the sales journey. Doing so, gives you more visibility on how deals are progressing and how that can impact cash flow for your company.

As we mentioned in 5.1, sales execution is about mastering the art of working through your sales funnel in an efficient manner. In this section of Chapter 5, we will talk about how the sales funnel, a seller-centric approach, and buyer journey, the customer-centric equivalent, work together to build a successful sales pipeline.

Ready?

Let’s dive in!

The sales funnel

Before we talk about the sales funnel, we should define two keywords that you’ll see throughout this section and that will eventually come up in real life as you take the ideas from this newsletter and apply them to your own operations. Those two keywords are: leads and prospects. Leads are people at the very top of your sales funnel—they have just learned about your business but don’t necessarily match your ideal customer persona yet. Prospects are leads that match your ideal persona and are more likely to make a purchase.  

Think of leads and prospects like apples on a tree. Leads are all the apples that are on the tree. You see them, you know they exist but you don’t know which ones are ripe and ready to be eaten. Prospects are the apples you’ve looked at, and they look ripe and ready to be picked. Now that we understand the difference, we can get into more detail about the sales funnel.

A sales funnel is a seller-centric visual representation of the typical journey a potential customer takes – from the first interaction with a business to the final purchase. It shows the stages a prospect goes through and helps businesses understand how to guide them towards making a purchase. The sales funnel focuses on what the company needs to do to move people along each stage of the funnel to finally get them to sign a deal. The funnel narrows, gets smaller and smaller, as prospects move through each stage, showing that not all prospects will convert into paying customers.

👉 We briefly introduced you to the sales funnel in our Chapter 1 event: Creating a Winning B2B Sales Strategy. In case you missed the event, you can watch the replay here.

The sales funnel is shaped like an upside down triangle and usually contains these four levels:

1. 💡 Awareness: The stage where leads first become aware of a product or service.
3. 💡 Interest: Leads begin showing interest by engaging with content or offerings usually because they are comparing solutions.
5. 💡 Decision: Leads turn into prospects and begin to move closer to making a purchase. This may look like requesting demos or requesting proposals.

• 💡 Action: The final stage, where the prospect makes a purchase or takes the desired action.

You can build your own version of the funnel with specific stages that fit your business. Regardless of how you build your funnel, it will always have a top, middle and bottom section, also called Top of Funnel (TOFU), Middle of Funnel (MOFU), and Bottom of Funnel (BOFU). Each section represents the different stages and the different types of actions and content needed at each stage to help leads convert into prospects and move from one stage to the other. Let’s look at each stage.

1. Top of Funnel (TOFU) – Awareness Stage

The goal of TOFU is to create awareness and attract new leads. To attract these leads you can use educational and broad-reaching material, which can get the attention of a large group of people without directly trying to make a sale. Think back to the inbound and outbound strategies we talked about in the last chapter.

Types of TOFU content are:

• 👉 Blog posts
• 👉 Social media content
• 👉 Infographics
• 👉 How-to guides
• 👉 Whitepapers
• 👉 Paid Ads
• 👉 SEO Content

2. Middle of Funnel (MOFU) – Consideration Stage

MOFU nurtures these initial leads by providing more in-depth information as they compare their options and solutions. Content for the MOFU stage of the funnel should have more detail and should be solution-focused to show the company’s experience and expertise.

MOFU content can include:

• 👉 Webinars
• 👉 E-books
• 👉 Email campaigns

3. Bottom of Funnel (BOFU) – Decision Stage

The last section of the funnel, also known as BOFU, has the goal of converting prospects into paying customers by directly addressing their needs and showing why your solution is the best fit. BOFU content is very specific and tailored to specific profiles.

Some examples of BOFU content are:

• 👉 Product demos
• 👉 Free trials
• 👉 Testimonials
• 👉 Pricing pages
• 👉 Case studies

👉 Each stage of the funnel requires different content and actions to transform leads into prospects and guide them through the funnel and towards conversion.

Before we talk about the buyer journey, let’s take a step back. Remember that the sales funnel is seller-centric – focuses on what a company needs to do to sell. Meanwhile, the customer-centric equivalent is the buyer or customer journey.

Understanding the buyer journey

In Chapter 2, we talked about the importance of knowing who your clients are. We discussed the difference between your ideal customer profile, customer personas and the buyer persona. You can think of that as an introduction to the buyer journey.

The buyer journey is the process that a potential customer goes through as they move from awareness of a problem or need to the final decision to purchase your product or service. It includes research, consideration, and decision-making as a buyer/customer moves closer to choosing your business. The buyer journey accounts for the emotional and psychological aspects of the buyer’s decision-making process.

Understanding the buyer journey will help you align your sales and marketing strategies to meet the needs of prospects at each stage.

We’ve just talked about two topics that can get a little confusing. Let’s pause and revisit what we just discussed to make sure we understand the difference between the sales funnel and the buyer journey.

While the buyer journey focuses on the customer’s perspective and thought process, the sales funnel focuses on the business’s process of converting leads into customers. Both concepts work together to ensure a smooth transition from awareness (top of the funnel) to purchase (bottom of the funnel).

The buyer journey will depend on your type of business. Think about where your clients look for solutions to their problems. Some possible answers can be in collective action groups, tradeshows and conferences, on the internet, and so on. Knowing this will help you target them more effectively. Getting this information is easier than it sounds. You can do research, look for any sustainability pledges they have made recently, look at their impact reports to see what they are currently focusing on, research their partnerships and when possible speak with them.

It is important to know that, naturally, larger, more expensive deals will have longer journeys when compared to smaller ones. These larger potential buyers or customers might be exciting but remember that they usually take longer to make decisions usually because there are a lot of stakeholders involved in the decision making process. Many larger organisations will want to know that you are corporate ready and have had traction because that signals trust and reduces risk for them. While the bigger deals may seem more exciting, having smaller deals with smaller businesses helps you close deals faster while building up your capabilities to work with a corporation later. We will discuss this in more detail in Chapter 6.

Now that we understand the sales funnel and buyer’s journey, let’s learn how we can build a pipeline that will continuously feed leads into our funnel.

What is a pipeline?

A sales pipeline is a visual representation of where potential customers are in the sales process. Unlike the sales funnel, which narrows down as leads become customers, a sales pipeline emphasises action steps and helps sales teams monitor their progress and manage deals at various stages. To make it easier to remember and differentiate between the two, remember that a sales pipeline is similar to an assembly line and the sales funnel as a coffee filter.

Key Stages of a Sales Pipeline:

1. 💡 Lead Generation: Identifying and capturing people’s interest in your product or service.
3. ✅ Qualification: Determining if the lead is a good fit based on needs, budget, and interest.
5. 🗣 Proposal or Pitch: Presenting the product or service to the potential customer.
7. 🤝 Negotiation: Discussing terms, pricing, or customisation.
9. 📝 Closing: Finalising the deal and converting the prospect into a customer.
11. 📞 Post-Sale: Ensuring customer satisfaction and encouraging repeat business or referrals.

The sales pipeline helps you keep track of multiple deals, prioritise leads, forecast revenue, and manage workloads efficiently. It gives you insights into bottlenecks, such as deals stalling at a particular stage, which can help you improve your sales process.​

Let’s see how you can build your own sales pipeline.

How to build a pipeline

Here is a step by step on building your own pipeline:

1. Identify Your Ideal Customer Profile:

Create detailed buyer personas and define the characteristics of your target market to focus efforts on the most promising prospects. Buyer personas should go beyond identifying mere demographics. Think about where they went to school, what they studied, what industry they work in, what is the average role title, what do they prioritise when making decisions, is it price or features. The more detailed your buyer personas are, the more accurate your sales and marketing strategies will be and the shorter and easier your sales process will be to manage.

2. Determine Your Sales Stages:

Outline specific stages in your sales process (e.g., lead generation, qualification, proposal) that reflect your customer journey from initial contact to closing. Not all businesses have the same sales stages. If you have potential customers that you are trying to sell to, pay attention to all of the actions you take before they become paying clients. Do this for a few prospects and see if you can identify a pattern. That pattern will be your sales cycle and will eventually become the different stages.

3. Set Criteria for Each Stage:

Establish clear entry and exit criteria for each stage. You need to set criteria that leaves no ambiguity – the more specific, the better. For example, you can move a prospect from the interest stage to the consideration stage after they have booked a demo and have requested a personalised proposal.

4. Generate and Capture Leads:

Implement strategies for attracting and capturing leads, including inbound marketing (SEO, content) and outbound tactics (cold calls, emails). Once you have the stage and the criteria for each stage set, you need to think about the content and actions you or your sales team will take to turn leads into prospects and move them from one stage to the next. Remember that the content you produce and actions you take will vary depending on the stage and part of the funnel they are in.

5. Prioritise Leads (Lead Scoring):

Create a lead scoring system to evaluate leads based on factors like engagement, budget, and fit, enabling you to focus on high-value opportunities. Not everyone who becomes interested in your business will be the right fit and that’s totally normal. You want to focus your resources on the businesses that you have a high likelihood of converting. At YSB we score and prioritise leads based on 4 Fs: Fun, Fame, Fortune, Future. Fun relates to the learning opportunities this new project can bring. Fame is the brand of the client and the ecosystem it belongs to. Fortune has to do with financial sustainability and, last but definitely not least, Future measures the impact that collaboration will have on society.

How to use LinkedIn to build your pipeline

LinkedIn can be a powerful tool to build a sales pipeline, especially in B2B sales. LinkedIn  allows you to connect with potential leads, nurture relationships, and move prospects through the buying process all within a single platform.

LinkedIn is the best platforms for building a B2B sales pipeline because it’s full of professionals, making it easy to connect with decision-makers and business leaders. With tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you can target people by industry, job title, and more, and easily find high-value leads. You can also build credibility through your profile, recommendations, and endorsements by sharing content like articles and case studies which positions you and your business as experts in your industry.

Now that we understand the power of LinkedIn, let’s see how we can start building our pipeline using LinkedIn.

• 👤 Optimise Your Profile: Make sure your personal and company profiles are fully optimised to reflect your value and expertise. This means updating your profile picture, banner, including CTAs and links to your website. You can optimise your LinkedIn profile by following this HubSpot guide.

• 🎯 Leverage LinkedIn Sales Navigator: Use LinkedIn Sales Navigator to find and target key decision-makers based on industry, company size, geography, and job title. Use this LinkedIn guide to learn how you can use Sales Navigator to its best advantage.

• 📢 Content Marketing: Regularly share content that speaks to your target audience’s pain points and interests. This can include industry insights, how-tos, case studies, or success stories. As a social entrepreneur you have a vision and a mission. You can share your opinions, educate others on your social mission and inspire change by building a LinkedIn personal brand. Having a successful personal brand will help you become the person of reference in your industry and can make lead generation much easier.

• 💬 Network and Engage: In the B2B world it’s all about who you know. Even if a prospect doesn’t end up buying, they can introduce you to others who will, this is why networking is so important. Follow top voices in your industry, engage with their posts whenever you can. Comment, react, reply and start to build relationships.

• 📈 Track and Measure Engagement: LinkedIn provides analytics for content and your profile. Use these insights to understand what content resonates best with your audience and tweak your strategy accordingly.

Using LinkedIn to build your sales pipeline is called social selling, the process of using social media platforms to find, connect and nurture leads. LinkedIn won’t be the only way you build your pipeline but it will most likely be how you nurture your connections.

How to manage your pipeline

Managing your sales pipeline is crucial because it will help you track and prioritise leads to ensure that you focus on prospects that have the potential of converting into paying customers. Effective pipeline management can help you increase your conversion rate and can help you maintain a consistent revenue flow.

You can manage your pipeline by:

Tracking and Measuring: Use CRM tools, like the ones we discussed in the previous section of Chapter 5, to track deals in real time. Monitor the amount of leads coming in each month and then see how fast or slow they move along the sales cycle. Identify bottlenecks, points where prospects get stuck, along the funnel and make improvements to your sales strategy.

KPIs you should track are:

• ✅ Number of Qualified Leads: The number of leads that meet your specific criteria.
• ✅ Conversion Rate: The percentage of leads that move from one stage of the pipeline to the next.
• ✅ Sales Cycle Length: The average amount of time it takes for a deal to move from initial contact to close.
• ✅ Win Rate: The percentage of deals won compared to the total number of deals in your pipeline.
• ✅ Average Deal Size: The average value of a closed deal.
• ✅ Lead Response Time: How long it takes for your sales team to follow up with new leads.

1. 👉 Create Action Plans for Each Stage: Create specific activities for each stage, such as outreach campaigns during lead generation or customised proposals during negotiation.

1. 👉 Regularly Review and Optimise: Continuously assess pipeline performance, identify bottlenecks, and adjust actions as needed.

By dividing the process into building and managing, you can create a structured system for converting leads and optimise it over time.

Best Practices

We covered a lot but there are a few more things you need to keep in mind when thinking about your sales pipeline.

In Chapter 3, we discussed how to negotiate. Remember that when negotiating on price you need to show prospects the value you bring and how your solution to their problem is the best in the market.

The duration of the sales cycle is different depending on the industry and product. Some sales cycles are short while others can take months or even years. Usually, the more complicated or costly the product is, the longer the sales cycle will be. And even once a prospect becomes a paying client, the journey isn’t over. You need to continue to nurture the relationship with existing clients to make sure they stay as clients for the long term or so they can refer you to others.

Larger deals may look exciting but they aren’t the easiest deals to close. Larger deals with big name clients are often more difficult and take longer to close for a variety of reasons. Usually, larger companies have a lot of stakeholders involved in the decision making process which means more people need to agree on a solution. This also means budgets need to get passed and approved. Revisit the interview with Fernanda Stefani from 100% Amazonia to see how she addresses this.

Checklist

• ✔️ Do you understand the difference between lead generation and acquisition?
• ✔️ After reading about the sales funnel, do you have content and processes already in place for each part of the funnel? What other resources do you plan on creating or implementing to fill in the gaps?
• ✔️ Is there only one type of persona that buys your product or service? What is their buyer journey like?
• ✔️ Do you have an idea of the different stages that will make up your pipeline? What about criteria that allows prospects to move along from stage to stage?
• ✔️ What KPIs do you plan on tracking to manage your pipeline?

Additional Resources

1. ► Create your buyer journeys and funnels using these free templates.
3. ► Learn more about the sales funnel and the different stages by reading this Zendesk blog.
5. ► Refresh your memory on creating a winning B2B sales strategy by watching the event recording here.
7. ► Need more clarification on the differences between the sales funnel and the buyer’s journey? Read this blog for more detailed information.
9. ► Ready to build your own pipeline? Use this to help you get started.

Welcome back!

In the past chapters, we covered everything from understanding your buyer persona, communicating your value proposition, developing a sales strategy, and building a sales pipeline. Now that you have your sales machine in place and you know the customer needs you are solving for, we are ready to jump into preparing your pitch and sales materials.

Value Proposition and Unique Selling Proposition

Before we start creating our pitches, let’s quickly revisit the value proposition and unique selling proposition. A value proposition is like your business’s promise to customers—it’s the reason they should choose your product or service over others. In one sentence, the value proposition clearly explains the unique benefits they’ll get, how it solves their problem, and why it’s better than the competition.

This is what a value proposition looks like:

• 👉 For socially conscious consumers and businesses, we provide high-quality, ethically sourced clothing that not only looks great but also supports artisanal communities in developing regions. By choosing our products, customers are making a positive impact on the environment through sustainable materials and on livelihoods by ensuring fair wages and safe working conditions.

On the other hand, a Unique Selling Proposition (USP) is what sets your product or service apart from the competition. It’s the distinct feature, benefit, or advantage that makes your offering unique and valuable to customers. In other words, your USP answers the question: “Why should someone choose you over anyone else?” In your case, your USP can, and most likely will be, your social or environmental impact.

And a USP will read like this:

• 👉 Unlike other clothing brands, we work directly with local artisans in marginalised communities, ensuring that 100% of our supply chain is fair trade certified. This means that every purchase helps to preserve traditional craftsmanship while providing fair wages and improving the quality of life for the artisans and their families.

Now that you understand what a value proposition is and why it’s important, let’s take it a step further and look at how to craft one for your own business.

How do you write your own value proposition

Writing a strong value proposition involves more than just describing your product or service—it’s about clearly communicating the specific benefits that set you apart and resonate with your target audience.

Here’s a step-by-step guide to writing one:

1. 🎯 Identify the Problem You Solve: Start by understanding your customers’ pain points. What problem are they facing, and how does your product or service fix it?

1. 🚀 Highlight the Key Benefits: Focus on what makes your solution unique. How does your product improve your customers’ situation? Is it faster, cheaper, more effective? Be specific about the benefits.

1. 💬 Be Clear and Concise: Your value proposition should be easy to understand at a glance. Avoid jargon and focus on plain language. Aim for a one- or two-sentence statement.

1. 👉 Show the Unique Differentiator: What makes your product stand out from the competition? Highlight that special feature or benefit that makes you the better choice.

1. 📝 Test and Refine: Once you draft it, test your value proposition with others. Does it make sense right away? Is it compelling enough? Gather feedback and adjust accordingly.

Give it a try and fill in the blanks on the following template to create your own value proposition.

[Your product/service] helps [target audience] to [solve specific problem] by [key benefit or unique feature].

Creating a winning elevator pitch

Once you’ve crafted a clear and compelling value proposition, you’re already halfway to creating a strong elevator pitch. An elevator pitch builds on your value proposition, but it’s a concise and engaging summary designed to capture attention quickly.

What is an elevator pitch

An elevator pitch is a brief, engaging way to explain what your business is all about. You can think of it like a short sales pitch. Imagine you’re in a lift with someone important, and you’ve got just 30-60 seconds to grab their attention. You want to share who you are, what you do, and why it matters, all in a quick, memorable way.

For example, “We’re a social enterprise that transforms discarded plastic into sustainable building materials, providing affordable housing for low-income families whilst reducing plastic waste. So far, we’ve helped over 100 families secure safe homes and kept thousands of tonnes of plastic out of landfills.”

It’s all about being clear, concise, and highlighting the impact!

Craft your elevator pitch

Creating a great elevator pitch is all about preparation, clarity, and a dash of storytelling. Here’s how to craft one that stands out and hits the mark:

• 👉 Start with the Basics: Who are you? What do you do? Why does it matter?

• 👉 Focus on the Unique Selling Point (USP): What makes your solution or business stand out? Whether it’s an innovative product, a social impact, or a distinctive feature, emphasise what sets you apart from the rest.

• 👉 Tailor for Your Audience: Your pitch might vary depending on who you’re speaking to. For potential investors, focus on growth and impact; for customers, highlight benefits and outcomes. change your wording to connect with the person you’re pitching to.

• 👉 Keep It Short and Punchy: Time is limited, so every word matters. Aim for 30-60 seconds max. Practice trimming your pitch down to only the most important details—keep it crisp and engaging.

• 👉 Practise, practise, practise: The more you practise, the smoother and more natural your pitch will sound. Rehearse in front of others to get feedback, and tweak it as needed. Make sure it doesn’t sound scripted—aim for a conversational tone.

Here’s an example of an elevator pitch:

1. “Hi, I’m Sarah from EcoHomes. We turn discarded plastic waste into affordable, eco-friendly housing solutions for low-income families. So far, we’ve helped over 100 families move into safe homes, whilst keeping thousands of tonnes of plastic out of the environment. We’re passionate about making a positive social and environmental impact, and we’re scaling to reach more communities. I’d love to discuss how we could work together on expanding our reach.“

🔍 How does your value proposition help you build your elevator pitch?

Your value proposition forms the core of your business and serves as the foundation for your elevator pitch. While the value proposition outlines what problem you solve, for whom, and how you’re different, the elevator pitch takes that information and condenses it into a quick, engaging summary designed to grab attention. Essentially, you’re taking the essence of your value proposition and turning it into a short, compelling story that makes listeners want to learn more.

In short, the value proposition is the “what” and “why,” and the elevator pitch is how you deliver it quickly and memorably.

Test your pitch

Once you’ve put together your elevator pitch, it’s time to put it to the test!

How to Test Your Elevator Pitch:

• 👥 Practice with Friends/Colleagues: Get feedback on clarity, engagement, and length.
• 🎙️ Record Yourself: Check for pacing, tone, and confidence in delivery.
• 👀 Use Real Situations: Test at networking events or meetings; observe reactions.
• ✍️ Ask for Summaries: Ensure your listener can recap your pitch accurately.
• ⏳ Time It: Ensure your pitch fits within 30-60 seconds.
• 👂 Gauge Interest: Watch for engagement or follow-up questions.
• 💡 A/B Testing: Try different versions and see which gets better results.

These steps will help you refine and perfect your pitch.

Prepare your pitch

After testing your pitch and refining it based on feedback, you’re ready to take it to the next level—preparing to pitch to a potential customer!

This is where having the right materials, like a well-crafted sales deck, comes into play. Your sales deck will support your pitch and help you convey your message clearly and effectively.

Plus, with a few presentation tips, you can ensure your delivery is engaging and leaves a lasting impression. Let’s explore how to prepare for that big pitch and what materials can help you shine!

Pitch Materials

When it comes to making a great impression during your pitch, having the right materials is key. A well-designed sales deck is one of the most powerful tools at your disposal.

What is a sales deck?

A sales deck is a visual presentation used to pitch a product or service to potential customers, clients, or investors. It’s typically used in meetings to explain what you offer, why it’s valuable, and how it solves your audience’s problem. A well-crafted sales deck helps guide the conversation, making your message clear and persuasive.

Here’s a simple template for a sales deck for potential buyers:

1. ✅ Title Slide: Your company name, logo, tagline.
3. ✅ Problem Statement: Define the challenge your audience faces with relatable data or examples.
5. ✅ Your Solution: Present your product/service concisely, highlighting key features. This is where you can use elements of your value proposition or USP.
7. ✅ Product/Service Overview: Briefly explain how it works with visuals.
9. ✅ Case Studies or Testimonials: Share success stories or testimonials from satisfied clients.
11. ✅ Competitive Landscape: Compare your solution to competitors using a chart.
13. ✅ Pricing/Packages: Outline your pricing model and options.
15. ✅ Closing Slide: Thank them and add your contact details.

How to ensure your pitch tells a story

A compelling sales deck isn’t just about facts and figures— it’s about telling a story that resonates emotionally and logically. Here’s how to weave storytelling into your presentation:

Follow a Clear Structure: Every good story has a beginning, middle, and end. For your sales deck:

• 👉 Beginning: Introduce the problem (the “conflict” or “challenge” your audience faces).
• 👉 Middle: Present your solution (the “resolution” to the problem), highlighting the journey from issue to solution.
• 👉 End: Share the results, success stories, and how their life will improve with your solution.

Use Real Examples: Bring the story to life by using real-world scenarios, case studies, or customer testimonials. If your business was created because of a problem you faced, use yourself as an example. Say something like “back in 2010 I was struggling with…..” This personalises the story and makes it relatable.

Things to remember when presenting your pitch

When presenting your pitch, there are a few key things to keep in mind that can help you connect with your audience and deliver your message effectively.

👀 Read the Room:

Observe body language. Pay close attention to how the audience is reacting. Are they nodding, leaning in, or showing interest? Or are they distracted, looking at their phones, or disengaged? Adjust your energy or approach based on their cues.

👤 Know Who’s in Front of You:

Do your homework. Research who you’re presenting to. Know their industry, business challenges, and what they care about. Tailoring your pitch to their specific needs makes it more relevant and impactful. For example, a CEO might care about the big picture and ROI.

💬 Tailor your Content and the Presentation to Your Audience:

Don’t use a one-size-fits-all presentation. Tailor the content so it directly speaks to your audience’s pain points and interests. This could mean emphasising certain slides over others or focusing more on specific features, benefits, or results.

✅ You Don’t Have to Present the Entire Presentation: Include an annex or appendix in your slide deck with extra details (e.g., data, technical specs, or case studies). You don’t need to go through these during your main pitch, but they can be there for reference if questions come up. This keeps your pitch concise while ensuring you have backup information at hand.

👂 Balancing Selling and Listening: Don’t Oversell. While it’s tempting to highlight all the amazing things your product does, overselling can turn people off. Keep it balanced by focusing on how your solution genuinely meets their needs. Let the product speak for itself through real examples and case studies. Listen to your audience’s feedback. They might have specific requirements or ideas for how your solution could work better for them. If that’s the case, show that you’re open to customising or adapting your offer.

📢 Have smooth transitions: Smooth transitions are key to keeping your audience engaged. Create connections between slides using phrases like “Now that we’ve seen the problem, let’s look at how we solve it” or “This brings us to our solution…” These bridge phrases guide the audience logically from one idea to the next. You can also ask rhetorical questions like,“So, how do we stand out in the market?”

👉 And above all, be confident. Confidence comes from preparation. The more familiar you are with your pitch, the more naturally you’ll present it. Practise your pitch multiple times to build that familiarity. Even if you’re feeling nervous, you can project confidence through strong body language—stand tall, make eye contact, and speak clearly. Over time, this will help you genuinely feel more confident in front of an audience.

To ease into your presentation, focus on breathing deeply and pacing yourself. Slowing down and pausing after key points allows your message to sink in and reduces nervousness. Keep the presentation conversational by engaging the audience and asking questions. Be quick on your feet. Anticipate questions and stay calm under pressure. If you’re unsure of an answer, it’s okay to admit it and offer to follow up. The key is handling the situation with grace.

There’s no one who knows your business better than you. You’ve got this!

Checklist

• ✔️ Have you written a value proposition that identifies the problem your business solves and the unique benefits it offers?
• ✔️ Have you written your elevator pitch? Did you keep it under 60 seconds?
• ✔️ Does your pitch resonate with all potential buyers? If not, how many different variations do you think you need?
• ✔️ How many case studies are you planning on including in your sales deck?
• ✔️ Are you confident pitching your business? Or do you feel like you need more practice?

Additional Resources

1. ► Don’t have a sales deck yet? Use these Canva templates to help you design your deck.
3. ► See how your pitch compares to these examples from HubSpot.
5. ► For more sales templates and ideas on how to present like a pro, check out this blog from Pipedrive.

Corporate Readiness

Corporate partnerships can be a game-changer for your business, allowing you to scale, access new markets, and build more sustainable growth.

Let’s say you partnered with a major international company to create a nutritious product for underserved communities. This partnership can help you expand production, improve efficiency, and reach a much larger audience, all while staying committed to your social mission. This is a clear example of how working with corporations can amplify your enterprise’s impact by leveraging their resources and networks.

Working with large companies is great but it’s not exactly where you should start – it’s important to start with smaller organisations to go through the learning curves, operationalise, and build the traction necessary to work with a corporation. Many successful companies begin by working with SMEs, learning from smaller-scale partnerships, and gaining valuable experience before stepping up to larger corporations. This way you can refine your processes and build the capacity needed to thrive in bigger corporate relationships down the road.

Regardless of whether you’re looking to work with SMEs or large corporations, the checklist of things to consider is the same.

Alignment with Corporate Needs

Before approaching a corporation, it’s important to assess whether your enterprise is aligned with their needs. Companies look for partners who can not only deliver on product quality but also for partners that align with their values and operational standards. 

Start by researching the corporation’s mission, sustainability goals, and procurement standards. These can usually be found on their website, typically on their “About” page. Ask yourself if your enterprise’s values, social impact, and product offerings are in sync with what they’re looking for. Being able to show a clear fit between your social mission and their business priorities can significantly boost your chances of securing a partnership. 

If you want to take it one step further, research their key stakeholders and take a look at the initiatives or organisations they are involved in. You can leverage this information by using it in your outreach campaigns. 

Readiness Factors 

To see if you are corporate-ready, there are important aspects of your business that should be inspected. Here’s a quick checklist of factors to consider:

• 👉 Compliance: Do you meet industry-specific regulations and legal standards? Corporations need partners who adhere to compliance requirements, including environmental, labour, and safety regulations.
• 👉 Customer Service: Are you equipped to provide the level of customer support that large corporations expect? Corporates prioritise smooth communication, fast response times, and issue resolution.
• 👉 Financial Health: Are your finances stable? Corporates often require partners to have a certain level of financial stability to handle large orders and extended payment terms.

👉 Quality Control: Do you have consistent quality control measures in place to ensure your products or services meet high corporate standards?

• 👉 Supply Chain Management: Is your supply chain robust enough to handle corporate demand while maintaining ethical and sustainable practices?

Importance of Referrals

You will come to learn that in the B2B world, especially when it comes to landing a corporate partnership, referrals are key. Having an introduction from someone trusted within the corporation can fast-track the process and increase your credibility. 

To get connected, start by leveraging your existing network—both professional and personal. Engage with people who are already working with corporations or have experience navigating that space.

Networking events, industry conferences, and online platforms like LinkedIn are excellent places to meet potential connections. Building a strong relationship with your SME partners can also lead to valuable introductions. Always make sure to nurture these relationships and ask for referrals in a way that benefits both parties.

If you can recall Jamie’s advice  about how referrals help social enterprises  break into the corporate world, he highlighted the importance of patience and building genuine connections with people who understand your business and mission. In case you missed Jamie’s event, you can watch the replay of it here.

Just like referrals, identifying “sponsors” within large organisations is crucial for building and sustaining strong partnerships. Sponsors are stakeholders who not only support the partnership but are also decision-makers who actively champion your social enterprise within their company.

Think of sponsors as your inside supporters or “cheerleaders” within the client organisation. Just like a cheerleader rallies a crowd, sponsors rally support for your partnership. They’re the ones who make sure everyone knows why your work matters and help keep the partnership strong, even when things change internally. Without them, it’s easy for the partnership to lose momentum, but with their support, it has a much better chance of lasting and growing.

Building these relationships becomes especially important when there’s a change in personnel within the client organisation—a common scenario that can put partnerships at risk. Without a sponsor to reinforce the partnership’s value, new contacts may not fully understand the mutual benefits or shared goals, which can create instability.

To mitigate this, it’s essential to build a robust, long-term relationship with the organisation that goes beyond simply supplying products or services. Establish a foundation based on shared values, transparency, and open communication so the partnership is viewed as a collaborative, strategic alliance rather than a transactional relationship. Think about doing regular check-ins, joint planning sessions, and demonstrating impact with reports or case studies. The ultimate goal is to make your social enterprise a trusted, indispensable part of the client’s vision, so the relationship thrives, even through changes in personnel or company priorities. 

When working with large corporations, managing cash flow can be tricky. Big contracts sound exciting, but they often come with delayed payments and upfront costs that can put pressure on your finances. 

Managing Cash Flow Challenges with Large Contracts

Corporations tend to have longer payment cycles, meaning you might wait 60 to 90 days to get paid after delivering your product or service. If you’re covering upfront costs—like production or labour—that can leave you strapped for cash. To avoid this, it’s a good idea to have a robust financial planning in place which includes cash flow management with accrued revenue. You will either want to have a financial cushion to cover these gaps and/or an ability to generate cash from other activities that will allow you to collect payment to cover your expenses. Having a financial plan in place will make sure you are not financially pressured while awaiting payment. 

There are many cash flow forecasting tools on the market. Check this list for some of the best cash flow forecasting tools for small businesses. But if you aren’t ready to pay for a tool yet, you can create your own forecasting document using excel. You can create a sheet and list expected income and expenses for each month, with a balance that updates automatically as you go. Adding a bit of colour-coding can highlight months when cash might get tight, helping you spot and prepare for any shortfalls in advance.

Negotiating Payment Terms

When negotiating with corporates, aim for terms that help your cash flow. One way is to ask for a portion of the payment upfront or arrange milestone payments such as  getting paid in parts as you hit different stages of the contract. For example, you can negotiate payment terms that include 20% to start activities, 50% when you are mid-way and the remaining 30% be paid when the order has been completed or the deliverable has been fulfilled. You can also try to shorten their typical payment terms—if they usually pay in 60 days, see if they’ll agree to 30 or 45 days. If that’s not possible, negotiating interest on late payments could give them more incentive to pay on time.

The key here is to be upfront about your needs and explain how faster payment terms benefit both of you. If you can show that it will help you deliver better or faster, they might be willing to be more flexible.

Keeping Cash Flow Steady

Here are a few tips to make sure you have cash coming in even when payments are slow:

• 👉 Working Capital Loans: These short-term loans help you cover everyday costs (like paying staff or suppliers) while you wait for your cash to come in. It’s a useful safety net to keep things moving.
• 👉 Diversify your revenue streams: You will want to continue working with other clients so you are not relying solely on one corporation to pay you. This may be another corporation or SMEs which have a shorter payment cycle. 
• 👉 Negotiate with Your Suppliers: Just like you’re negotiating with corporates for better payment terms, try to work out extended terms with your suppliers too. This way, you have more time to pay them while waiting for your own payments.
• 👉 Set Clear Payment Terms: Be sure to spell out your payment terms clearly in your contract, including what happens if payments are late. This avoids confusion down the line and ensures everyone is on the same page from the start.

With a bit of foresight and smart planning, you can handle the ups and downs of cash flow—even when dealing with large contracts. These strategies will help you stay in control and scale your business without the stress!

Boosting Production Capacity

Here are some tips to help you scale up with confidence:

• ✅ Check Your Supply Chain: Make sure your suppliers can keep up with bigger orders, and if necessary, build relationships with backup suppliers. Having reliable suppliers means fewer hiccups when things get busy. Here is a list of some supply chain software solutions.

• ✅ Automate Where Possible: If there are tasks that can be automated, like inventory management or client communication, now’s the time to invest in tools or software that can help. It’ll free up your time for the important stuff! Try to start with high-impact automations like inventory and client communications. 

• ✅ Train Your Team: As you scale, your team needs to be ready too. Invest in training so they’re equipped to handle new challenges and bigger projects with ease. LinkedIn learning is an accessible training resource you can use. 

• ✅ Monitor Capacity Regularly: Keep an eye on your production or service capacity over time, so you know exactly when you’re reaching your limits and what needs to change as you grow. You can use softwares like Kantata for production planning and you can read more about capacity planning metrics here.

Getting your operations and production processes ready now will make scaling up much smoother when those big corporate contracts roll in. 

Quality, Risk Avoidance, Compliance

When working with corporations, quality and compliance are non-negotiable. These companies rely on their partners to meet high standards, and they’ll expect the same from you. 

Meeting High Corporate Standards & Helping Them Avoid Risk

Corporations want to avoid risk at all costs, and that includes choosing partners who won’t compromise their reputation or supply chain. By consistently meeting their standards, you show that you’re reliable and won’t introduce any risks into their operations. This could mean delivering products that meet strict specifications, following regulations to the letter, or providing services with no room for error.

Think of yourself as part of their bigger picture—your ability to deliver consistently helps them avoid potential problems down the line, like delays, defects, or compliance issues. When they trust you to handle these aspects, they’re more likely to come back with repeat business.

Quality Control and Certifications

Having strong quality control processes in place is essential to maintaining the high standards that corporations expect. Whether it’s checking every product before it ships or regularly auditing your service delivery, quality control ensures that nothing slips through the cracks.

For product-based businesses, having certifications can really boost your credibility. Certifications like ISO standards or eco-friendly labels show that your products meet international standards, which can make a huge difference when dealing with large, risk-averse companies. For service providers, industry-specific certifications or compliance with data protection laws (like GDPR) can give potential corporate clients peace of mind. If you remember, we shared a list of certifications back in Chapter 2.

Investing in quality control and getting the right certifications will not only help you stand out but also give your corporate clients the confidence that you’re a partner they can trust. Plus, it keeps your operations running smoothly and reduces the risk of mistakes that could cost you business down the line.

By making quality and compliance a priority, you’re setting yourself and your company up for long-term success, no matter how big your corporate clients get.

As we wrap up this series—it’s clear that selling to large corporations is both a challenge and an opportunity. By preparing early, you can start building your business in a way that meets the high standards that big businesses expect from the get go. 

Getting corporate ready is no easy feat and if you’re unsure of where to start or would just like to know that you are on the right track, reach out to experts. You can find experts by joining the MovingWorlds platform where you can connect with qualified corporate professionals that volunteer their time and expertises to support local enterprises in becoming corporate ready and scale. You can learn more about MovingWorlds at https://movingworlds.org/

Above all, remember to start where you are, learn from working with SMEs, and grow steadily so that when larger opportunities come, you’re ready to seize them.

Interview with Claudine Leclerc, from Groupe Arès & Social CoBizz

1. Claudine Leclerc,
2. Groupe Arès & Social CoBizz

We had the honour of interviewing Claudine Leclerc, Program Director at Groupe Arès, which is one of the largest French social enterprises, specialised in professional and social inclusion. Check out the valuable insights she shared with us below!

Can you tell us more about Groupe Arès?

• Arès, founded in 1991, is a social enterprise focused on professional and social inclusion. Our mission is to help people who are far from the labour market transition into regular employment. We do this through our programs which run across a network of 15 entities, across four different sectors: logistics, construction, circular economy, and digital. Through our core activities and  operations, we empower 1,500 to 2,000 people each year.

• Our B2B clients play a key role in supporting our mission, both by enabling our activities and by hiring our trainees for long-term positions after their inclusion period. 

Very interesting! And what is the link with SocialCobizz?

• Through our work at Groupe Arès, we’ve come to innovate with some clients and co-create social joint ventures which address a specific social mission. The way it works is that Arès owns 51% of this new entity and the client owns 49%. We’ve tested this model already with large clients such as GXO, Accenture, the SEB Group, and VINCI.
• In 2016, we decided to launch SocialCobizz, a sister company of Groupe Arès which supports businesses in developing social joint ventures and social impact projects more broadly. SocialCobizz has been co-launched with our partners Vitamine T and Investir+. It is made of a team of 5 consultants, with very operational expertise.

Could you tell us more about your B2B journey? And how do you work with corporate clients?

• The key factor in convincing a company to co-create a joint venture with us is understanding what is the strategic goal this partnership can address. What will make this project truly valuable to the client? Of course, corporate social responsibility and sustainability are growing topics, but they’re not usually enough to convince a company and ensure their lasting commitment. 
• It is therefore essential to first identify the needs and strategic priorities of the company. For example, do they face recruitment challenges in hard-to-fill roles? In that case, they may need support with talent identification, training, and integration. Or perhaps the company is trying to position in a market where including social clauses is expected from their customers. Some organisations are also trying to advance on their ecological transition. These are just a few examples of strategic priorities a lead may have and where we can bring value.

Once you identified those needs, what is your offering?

• Our methodology is structured in several stages:
• ✅  Awareness: We start by introducing clients to the social and solidarity economy, showcasing examples of social joint ventures and other impact-driven collaborations.

1. ✅  Project Scoping: Once the client is interested, we identify the potential project and key stakeholders needed to bring it to life.

1. ✅ Implementation: We executive the project, which includes the economic and legal structuring needed.

And what is the profile of your B2B clients? Have you started working with smaller or bigger companies?

• Both. Through our link with Arès, we attracted interest from large companies right at the beginning. At the same time, we really see the value in working with small and medium-sized businesses, which often have greater flexibility in decision-making and face the same challenges as large corporations—such as recruitment, ecological transition, and market positioning.
• And on the Groupe Arès side, we count a very diverse portfolio with a total of 250 clients. While we’ve quickly gained large clients, we also work with smaller organisations—some of which have grown alongside us. For instance, Veja entrusted Arès with its logistics from the start of its journey. Our relationships vary greatly: some clients come to us for one-time projects, others are regular clients, and some even become long-term partners.

Are there specific factors to consider when working with large corporations? Have you encountered any obstacles or challenges?

• One key factor is choosing the right point of contact. In smaller companies, decision-makers are often easier to reach. But in a large corporation, it’s essential to identify the right entry point and secure a high-level sponsor who can champion the project. Without this internal sponsor, it often comes down to price alone, so building a genuine partnership is crucial.
• Understanding payment processes is also important. Large companies typically have specific procedures for setting up vendor accounts, which means we need to know all their requirements to ensure timely payments.
• There’s also a need for rigour, which applies to all clients but especially with larger ones, where expectations around service quality and regular reporting can be even higher and more formalised.

Did you need to adapt any of your internal processes to meet these standards and requirements?

• Yes, we’ve had to adjust our information systems to better track our logistics services. We’ve also implemented client monitoring systems to manage cash flow and ensure timely follow-ups.For example, as Arès works in logistics and construction, we need full traceability for our activities, which is best managed through a Warehouse Management System (WMS). Implementing this kind of software allows us to monitor production and operations effectively.
• That being said, we don’t want to treat large companies differently from smaller ones. In fact, managing a diverse portfolio of smaller clients, each with unique needs, can sometimes be more complex than working with a large corporation with clear, established processes.

As final words, what advice would you give to other social entrepreneurs entering the B2B space?

• Never forget that you should start by understanding your clients’ needs and making it clear how your solution directly addresses them.
• Claudine Leclerc, Program Director at Groupe Arès and Director at SocialCoBizz

Checklist

• ✔️ Assess demand capacity: Are you able to meet the demand? Confirm your capacity for higher volumes and adjust resources or equipment as needed to meet corporate demand.
• ✔️ Negotiate payment terms: Aim for favourable payment terms. Ensure cash reserves or financing options if long payment cycles are required. And if you weren’t able to negotiate the terms you wanted can your business handle corporate payment terms?

• ✔️ Manage cash flow: Are you able to manage your cash flow, deliver on the demand with late payment/these payment terms? Use cash flow forecasting tools and consider other possible financing options like lines of credit, cash advances, etc.

• ✔️ Maintain quality control: Is your company ready to deliver without sacrificing quality? Focus on strengthening quality assurance processes to handle increased volume without sacrificing standards.

Additional Resources

1. ► Want to learn more about how corporations and social enterprises do business together to drive impact? Read this Acumen report. 
3. ► Rewatch our event on Building Allies & Key Partnerships, here.
5. ► Watch this video on ecosystem mapping.
7. ► Join the TRANSFORM Support Hub to find a probono consultant to help you become corporate ready.

Sell Like a Champion

• with Anine Ward, Consultant & B2B Expert

• Learn how to save time, energy, and resources with a targeted approach on the right buyers. Anine Ward, Senior Client Partner- Enterprise at Andela, dives into sales execution and how to sell efficiently.

• Watch here