What is B2B communication?
The definition of communication is an interaction between two or more people. In fact, we humans communicate more than we think, as we are constantly communicating in and with our environment - both consciously and, indeed, subconsciously.
If you ask a communication researcher, he or she will tell you that the basic elements of communication always include:
- one sender
- a message
- one channel
- one or more beneficiaries
When we communicate in the B2B market, we communicate from business to business. The sender can be an employee of the company, a department of the company or sent on behalf of the whole company.
The message can either be tailored personally to one specific recipient or be of a more general nature.
The choice of channel can be a single or multiple channels and the recipient can also be a single person in a company, a department or an entire company who is thought to be a relevant recipient of the message - this could be a potential customer for the product you are selling.
How can I communicate with potential customers?
Your communication to potential customers can be both verbal and non-verbal.
- If you are marketing yourself on a social media (e.g. LinkedIn) to B2B companies, where you can only express yourself through text, a banner, an image or a video, this is non-verbal communication.
- If you send an email to a potential customer (for example outreach), you are also communicating non-verbally, as you are not speaking directly to the recipient of your message.
- If you call the potential customer to arrange a meeting, you are communicating verbally, since you can only use your voice.
- If you finally take part in a physical or online meeting with the potential customer, you will be able to make use of both your verbal speech and non-verbal body language, which will increase your chances of closing a sale, if you use both your speech and body language wisely.
Why is good B2B communication important?
Building good customer relationships in the B2B world requires both trust and good customer relations. Without communicating, we cannot build good relationships and without good relationships, the chance of gaining trust is very small.
If you want to sell a product or service to a business, your job is to influence the recipient of the message to think and act in a certain way - whether that's through marketing or in a sales pitch.
In the last section, you were introduced to the model of the basic elements of communication, which include: sender, message, channel and receiver. In addition, it should be mentioned that there is typically noise on the line, which should be understood as a dispute in the message that the sender wants to send to the receiver.
Imagine that the sender is an actor who encodes and sends a message through a channel, which is received by the receiver who finally decodes the message. It is not certain that the message sent by the sender will be decoded by the receiver as the sender had intended.
We are all different and look at the world through different glasses, we have different backgrounds and thus a message can be understood in several ways, depending on who is decoding the message. For this reason, it is incredibly important that we are easy to understand when we communicate.
B2B marketing, sales and communication in general have for many years been characterised by formal language - but what good is it if the recipient you are sitting in front of doesn't understand it?
