Three tips for generating B2B growth:
- Anticipate organizations’ needs, solve for trends, and future-proof.
- Find and nurture partners you can collaborate with.
- Innovate with a focus on how you can help companies better connect with their customers.
For many companies, business-to-business (B2B) sales translate into bigger and longer-term contracts that provide more predictable revenue streams.
Strong B2B sales can spark and nurture long-term partnerships, while businesses that pursue B2B growth are often able to scale more efficiently since they end up focusing on fewer, high-value clients. However, for startups, finding and then maintaining solid and sustainable growth in B2B channels is no easy feat.
From a booze-free cocktails maker to a provider of gaming content for cardio equipment to a distributor of healthy fruit and snack boxes, a trio of startup founders share their strategies for B2B success with CO—.
Succeeding in B2B entails embracing your businesses’ strengths, understanding potential clients’ pain points and how they want to serve customers, staying active on social media, and consistently approaching challenges with an innovative mindset, they say.
‘Places that care about the guest experience, the highest quality experience, that’s where Curious really shines.’
JW Wiseman, Founder, Curious Elixirs
In 2015, when bar and nightclub and marketing agency owner JW Wiseman woke up hangover-free after having 20 drinks during a single night out, he knew he needed to change his relationship with alcohol: He wanted complex cocktails without the liquor.
He started tinkering in his home kitchen using herbs, roots, and juices to make a nonalcoholic Negroni and a booze-free Dark and Stormy. During the opening night party for his Aqua Beach Hotel on Long Island, New York, Wiseman set out a jug of one of his concoctions labeling it “Curious Elixir #1.” Patrons drained it.
“That was when the lightbulb moment went off for me,” Wiseman said, “that, maybe there’s a business here.”
Seven years later, Curious Elixirs now sells nine flavors of booze-free cocktails plus an alcohol-free craft beer. Wiseman drew from his own hospitality experience to understand bartenders’ and restaurant owners’ pain points and design products with them in mind. He wanted to offer a high-end product that was easy to serve.
“As a business, the more and more complex you get, you need something simple you can rely on every time,” he said. “You don’t have the time to mix six different ingredients behind the bar to make something delicious.”
Because relationships with businesses take time to cultivate, the company got its start selling direct to consumer. But now, B2B is a rapidly growing part of Curious Elixirs, double what it was last year.
One of the startup’s first B2B customers, California Michelin star restaurant The French Laundry, found the brand on Instagram, a reminder of the power of posting content on social media. Bringing them on was a eureka moment, said Wiseman.
“I realized places that deeply care about hospitably for customers are a great fit for Curious,” he said. That realization helped him fine-tune his list of B2B clients to pursue.
Other B2B clients now include New York jazz club Blue Note, which started carrying Curious Elixirs as its exclusive nonalcoholic option, Wiseman said, and Ikigai restaurant in Brooklyn, New York, which is doing more in sales with nonalcoholic food-drink pairings than alcoholic pairings. Renowned upscale New York restaurant Daniel
sells Curious, too, as do yoga studios and spas.
The business has gotten a boost as well from working with its first distributor — family-owned and operated wholesale alcohol distributor Great Lakes Wine & Spirits. Some 100 of the distributor’s salespeople pitch Curious Elixirs’ products to stores nationwide.
“That got us from zero to 200 places in Michigan alone,” said Wiseman. “How powerful is it when another company really gets what you’re doing?”
With the B2B business bump, Curious Elixirs sold over 3 million bottles and cans in 2024. The brand is on track to grow around 20% this year, reaching between $15 to $20 million in revenue, Wiseman said. By 2030, it’s projected to reach $176 million in revenue.
Meanwhile, the company throws an annual “Great Curious Cocktail Party,” partnering with retailers and consumers to throw over 100 “sober curious” parties across the country. Curious Elixirs supplies beverages for free, building brand awareness with both consumers and other businesses that could ultimately become clients.
“What we hope is that we can help other businesses make money as consumer tastes change,” Wiseman said.
[Read more: How 3 Startups — Duckbill, Harbor, and OneRail — Landed Funding Windfalls]
To build a successful B2B business, you really do have to understand your partner and what their problems are and how you can help to solve those problems.
Tom Aulet, Co-Founder and CEO of Ergatta
‘To get where we wanted to get to, as a matter of scale, we had to explore B2B partnerships to achieve that vision.’
Tom Aulet, Co-Founder and CEO, Ergatta
When Tom Aulet’s knees hurt from regular runs around his Brooklyn neighborhood, he bought a rowing machine. But he dreaded the workouts. They bored him.
Together with two business partners, Aulet talked to other adults who were bored with their fitness routine too.
“We figured out that we could solve for a specific customer, like me with gaming,” he said. Now, Aulet is Co-Founder and CEO of Ergatta, a provider of gaming content for cardio equipment. The startup sells its own custom rower direct to consumers and also partners with big fitness brands like Peloton, Technogym, and NordicTrack to incorporate gaming into their workout systems.
“When you get on your bike or rower, you’re racing against your friends, unlocking new content, new levels. It almost feels like you’re playing a sport, and that makes you look forward to the next workout,” Aulet said.
Part of the company’s success — Ergatta has posted rapid revenue growth within eight months of launch in 2020, reaching a $35 million annual run rate, translating to over $3 million in monthly revenues — has been to find partners that complement the founding teams’ strengths.
“We’re software and marketing people, not hardware people,” Aulet said. “We needed a hardware solution and partnered with designer and manufacturer WaterRower so we could focus on [our core strengths] and bring an integrated product to market.”
Rower sales started in 2020 during the pandemic as direct to consumer (DTC). But then, the business evolved.
“We wanted gaming content on every piece of cardio equipment in the world,” Aulet said, “and we weren’t going to get there by selling rowing machines [DTC].”
So the startup pivoted, setting its sights on partnering with companies that at first blush seemed like direct competitors.
“To get where we wanted to get to, as a matter of scale, we had to explore B2B partnership to achieve that vision,” Aulet said.
Ergatta is leaning into its software and gaming expertise and designing custom gaming experiences for big fitness brands to help them better engage their customers through habit-building. It’s found a niche in helping fitness brands acquire and engage new audiences, specifically a younger, male audience bored with current fitness offerings. In March, Ergatta launched a partnership with iFIT, the interactive fitness and workout app that integrates with machines such as NordicTrack.
The company has been consistently profitable for each of the past six quarters, said Aulet, earning between $8 to $9 million in referring revenue. He anticipates that in three years’ time, the company’s B2B business will be equal in revenue to its B2C arm.
“From scale, impact, and reach, the B2B [business] is already bigger,” he added.
Part of building a profitable B2B business is truly understanding other organizations’ needs, solving for trends and future-proofing, said Aulet.
“To build a successful B2B business, you really do have to understand your partner and what their problems are and how you can help to solve those problems,” he said.
[Read more: 3 Entrepreneurs on Building Million-Dollar Businesses]
‘One of the things we always tried to do is listen to our clients and be nimble.’
Erin Mittelstaedt, CEO, The FruitGuys
Since its founding in 1998, San Francisco-based The FruitGuys’ bread and butter has been delivering fresh seasonal fruit and healthy gourmet snack boxes to mostly corporate offices nationwide to stock employee break rooms, plus school districts.
Business all but screeched to a halt during the height of COVID when offices shuttered in favor of remote work. The family-owned business lost nearly 90% of its business during the work-from-home era of the pandemic.
As organizations have returned to in-person the last few years, however, The FruitGuys has seen a significant rebound in its B2B business. It returned to profitability in 2023. Now, it delivers to around 3,500 locations, including banks, manufacturing companies, and schools, nationwide.
“One of the things we always tried to do is listen to our clients and be nimble,” said Mittelstaedt. For example, when schools switched to remote, Mittelstaedt and her team kept in close contact with administrators, who shared that they still needed to provide fresh food for their mostly low-income families.
“So, we [pivoted and] were able to devise a program that worked for them,” she said. The FruitGuys packed fruit and veggies in bags and arranged for a drive-through window delivery, instead.
“It’s really about how can we make things easier for you?” Mittelstaedt said. “And it’s the same thing with companies — they still had a need to engage with their employees even though they weren’t coming into the office physically.”
Finding — and nurturing — partners to help scale its B2B business has been essential, too, says Mittelstaedt. The FruitGuys has been intentional about building close relationships with office food and beverage providers, especially.
“Fruit is hard because it’s perishable,” she said. “We come in and take that hard part off of their plate.”
Being intentional about adding new and interesting snack brands like Mezcla plant protein bars and Cheddies Crackers to boxes, plus having comprehensive customer service training, has helped to fuel the company’s B2B business as well.
“And we’re also realistic if we just can’t meet a client’s needs,” said Mittelstaedt.
Success is about continuing to innovate to meet clients’ needs, she added. The FruitGuys started to organize engagement activities for its company clients. For example, it recently set up a farmer’s market-style event at a new client’s office where employees could come “shop” for free produce during work.
“We’re always looking for different ways to innovate, and we’re getting more and more requests for engagement activities,” Mittelstaedt said. “Our clients really want to connect with their employees and earn that commute.”
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