Close or Pipedrive for a B2B Marketplace's Two-Sided Sales Team

Bringing new buyers onto a marketplace often looks like a fairly standard outbound motion: a high volume of calls and emails to procurement or operations contacts at companies who could source through the platform instead of their current channel. Close's dialer and sequencing fit this well, especially in the early growth phase when the marketplace needs a lot of buyer conversations to find the ones that convert, since early buyer segments are rarely obvious until a team has tested several at once.

Getting a supplier to list on a marketplace usually means convincing them to change how they've sold for years, sometimes cutting out an existing distribution relationship, which takes a longer, more consultative conversation than a buyer-side cold call. Pipedrive's board suits this better: fewer active conversations, each needing careful tracking of objections raised, terms discussed, and internal stakeholders on the supplier's side who all need to sign off before anything moves forward.

Say the marketplace is expanding into a new product category and needs to sign ten anchor suppliers before buyer demand will follow. Track this as its own pipeline or filtered view, separate from routine buyer-side outbound, since it's a strategic initiative with a small number of high-stakes conversations rather than a volume game, and it deserves manager-level visibility that a generic deal list wouldn't surface on its own, especially once the first few anchor suppliers are close to committing.

A marketplace's real health metric isn't how many buyers or suppliers signed up, it's whether both sides are actually transacting once they're on the platform. Neither Close nor Pipedrive tracks post-signup transaction activity natively, so plan to connect signup data from the CRM to your platform's own usage data, even if that connection is a simple manual export at first, so sales isn't just chasing signups that never turn into real activity on either side of the platform.

Running buyer and supplier acquisition through the same undifferentiated pipeline makes it hard to tell whether the marketplace's real bottleneck is buyer demand or supplier supply at any given moment, which matters enormously for where to focus the next quarter's sales effort. Split the two clearly, even within one CRM instance, using separate pipelines or a required deal-type field, so the two motions never blur together in weekly reporting.

New business B2B deals close in an average of 91 days, against 52 days for expansion with an existing customer¹, and a marketplace's buyer-side deals often land closer to that faster expansion-style pace, while supplier-side deals asking a company to change its whole sales channel tend to run longer. Set separate cycle-time expectations for each side rather than holding both to the same target.

A new supplier or buyer's early experience on the platform often depends on decisions outside the sales team entirely: how fast onboarding is reviewed, whether a trust and safety check clears quickly, whether the first transaction actually goes smoothly. Whichever CRM the sales team uses, build a clear handoff point where a signed account moves to whoever owns onboarding, with enough context passed along that the new user isn't asked to repeat information they already gave a salesperson only weeks earlier in the process.

It's tempting to measure a sales team purely on signups, since that's the number that moves fastest and looks best on a dashboard, but a marketplace with a pile of inactive accounts on either side isn't actually growing in any way that matters. Tie sales incentives and reporting to activated, transacting accounts wherever possible, not just signed contracts, so the team isn't quietly optimizing for a number that doesn't reflect real platform health or real revenue for the business over time.

A practical setup for a two-sided sales team looks like this:

• Keep buyer and supplier acquisition in separate pipelines, or add a required field that distinguishes them, inside one CRM instance.
• Set separate deal-length expectations for each side, since supplier deals asking a company to change its sales channel tend to run longer.
• Connect CRM signup data to your platform's own usage data so you can see which signups become transacting accounts.
• Build a clear handoff from sales to the onboarding and trust teams once an account signs.
• Tie sales reporting and incentives to activated, transacting accounts rather than signups alone.