In Business-to-business selling, sales strategy matters. As we all know, not all channels are created equally, and in B2B this is especially true. While there are many, many different channels to choose from, the fundamental choice all businesses need to make when selling B2B is whether to allocate sales resources to inbound or outbound channels.

Of course, it depends on the circumstances surrounding your product or service whether inbound or outbound is more effective. If you’re just starting out however, and are unsure of which channel to go with, I’ll make a case for either of these below.

From my observations, in B2B it seems the most effective method of selling is dictated by how critical the application, service or product is to the business you’re selling to. For instance in the medical device industry (where most of the complex machines they use are critical for the practice to function), sales strategies are heavily skewed to outbound channels with registered sales professionals.

Using outbound channels where the solution is business critical is important for a number of reasons. Firstly, outbound sales are usually “comparative sales”, in that the product or service you are selling is some version of a “better mousetrap”. If the thing you are selling is business critical, most businesses won’t spend a lot of time wondering how it could be made better. In turn businesses will generally be more likely to accept the status quo due to the lack of available time to invest in researching a better solution. It’s for this exact reason that outbound channels matter, relieve the time it takes to research a better solution.

There are exceptions to every rule though, and many successful business critical solutions have found their way through a combination of inbound and outbound (CRM solutions like Salesforce and Hubspot are notable in this regard).

Where there is a lack of urgency in the product, inbound selling seems to be the way to go. Depending on the context of the product or service, you’ll usually see inbound being a lot more effective where there isn’t a strong need (yet), so working to create that need will be paramount.

Running campaigns for lead capture buys you the time to create a sales strategy for each business, and in doing so, let’s you see what the best way forward is. Usually B2B selling for these kinds of products is about building a pipeline based around the awareness of the problem, as opposed to why your product is better.

Whether you choose inbound or outbound strategy, the priority is to decide where your audience will be. Once you consider how critical your product or service is to the business, and in doing so, use this as the driving force for your marketing channels.