Corporate sales or Business to Business (B2B) sales involves sales activities between different businesses. For example, a firm that manufactures tyres sells its products to a firm that manufactures automobiles.
Sales and Marketing existed way before currency came into existence. Corporate sales has evolved along with sales and marketing. Let’s have a quick run through the evolution of sales and marketing along with it the evolution of Corporate Sales:
1. Barter System:
This was the first kind of sales activity that was practiced thousands of years ago when were no coins and other forms of money were not common. People used to give things they dealt in, in exchange of things they wanted to procure. For example, if a farmer wanted to purchase some wooden furniture, he could do so by giving some of his harvest to the carpenter. Though the barter system was practiced centuries ago, it still can replace money in conditions like unavailability or instability of currency due to high inflation.
2. Traditional Marketplace:
Traditional marketplaces are usually small markets where price negotiations and other decisions related to sales are made quickly—often by one or two persons. There may be significant flexibility regarding discounts and additional product benefits. The focus is more on short-term gains and less on long-term transactions and relationships. There is negligible branding and advertising; rather the objective is to sell what has been produced.
3. Seller’s Marketplace:
The main objective of the seller’s marketplace is to establish a supply chain to procure products, and then establish a distribution channel to sell the products to a wide variety of customers, often referred to as “mass marketing.” The practice of using channel partners to sell products was established during this period. Emphasis on branding and advertising is minimal in a seller’s marketplace.
4. Conventional Mass Media Marketing:
The objective of conventional mass media marketing is for organizations to create strong brands and differentiated brand perceptions so that consumers will desire and purchase their products rather than those available from competitors. Thus, mass media marketing usually uses cumulative repetition over time to influence consumer attitudes and purchase actions. Mass media marketing also involves creating distribution channels and appropriate pricing and positioning strategies to ensure that desirable products are available to customers at specific price points.
5. Fragmented New-Age Marketing:
In recent times, the media has become increasingly fragmented with several hundred television and radio channels, as well as a large variety of print media, including newspapers, magazines, and trade publications. Moreover, since the late nineteen nineties, with the increasing popularity of the Internet and, more recently, smartphones, many options now exist for advertisers to reach a global audience using digital media marketing methods such as cell phone apps, Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, QR codes, gamification, and proximity marketing (e.g., Foursquare).
6. Innovative Internet-Enabled Business Models:
The growing popularity of the Internet, smartphones, and digital media provide opportunities for a company to not only use fragmented new-age marketing effectively to promote existing products, but also to come up with innovative business models where product demo, customer acquisition, and order fulfillment can also take place online.
Corporate sales has evolved concurrently with sales and marketing from barter system to being online and is evolving day by day as new methods and technologies come to the fore.
