Russia’s business-to-business sales market is expanding rapidly, but the firms best placed to benefit are increasingly those that reach customers long before a tender is formally announced.
According to industry forecasts, the market could reach 4.2 trillion roubles by 2030, although other recent estimates are far more ambitious. RBC reported in December 2025 that the head of B2B-RTS, Kirill Tolcheev, expected Russia’s procurement market to more than double by 2030 to above...
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66 trillion roubles, excluding sanctions-hit and defence-related purchases. Earlier this year, B2B-Center and Data Insight said the wider B2B and B2G e-commerce market was worth 65.8 trillion roubles in 2024 and could surpass 150 trillion roubles by 2030.
Against that backdrop, companies are under pressure to sharpen their sales tactics. HubSpot has warned that modern B2B sales increasingly depend on navigating buying committees and lengthy decision cycles, with sales teams shifting from simply presenting products to helping shape the decision itself.
That is the approach promoted by Andrey Matvienko, deputy sales director at SGA-Engineering, an equipment maker serving Russia’s oil and gas sector. He argues that vendors often lose out because they arrive too late, after the technical requirements for a tender have already been set in favour of another supplier. In his view, the winning strategy is to work with decision-makers from the earliest stages of a project, when specifications are still being formed.
Matvienko says those decision-makers are not always the executives at the top of the organisation. More often, they are chief engineers, technical directors, project office heads or other managers who influence what ultimately appears in the tender documentation. In large B2B projects, he says, technical requirements are often shaped three to six months before the tender is published, which means the first serious conversation may need to happen well before any procurement notice is issued.
He describes this as a chain of engagement running from project institute to customer to contractor, with sales teams joining the process during preliminary design work. The aim, he says, is not to force a sale early, but to demonstrate expertise, understand the client’s constraints and become a partner rather than a mere supplier.
That logic has proved effective in one of Russia’s most guarded industries. Matvienko says his company has built a leading share of the market for pipeline control and safety valves supplied to subsidiaries and projects tied to one of the country’s biggest oil and gas groups. The result, he says, has been a shift away from one-off tender wins towards a more stable order book built on long-term relationships.
Trust, in his telling, rests on three pillars: competence, reliability and openness. Competence means understanding the client’s industry, technology and regulatory environment. Reliability means delivering on time and continuing to support the project. Openness, he says, means being honest about risks rather than overselling a product. That combination, he argues, creates the sort of credibility that eventually brings clients back for advice, and not just for deliveries.
He also points to a pair of common mistakes made by suppliers. The first is arriving with a ready-made product without understanding the customer’s problem. The second is trying to close a contract at the first meeting, when the relationship may still be too shallow to support a deal. In some cases, he says, firms may need to work on several projects with little or no margin before the relationship pays off.
To stop success depending on individual salespeople, Matvienko says his company created an internal standard setting out how to operate at each stage, from early project discussions to commissioning. The idea is to turn personal expertise into a repeatable business system, allowing new hires to avoid obvious mistakes and enabling experienced staff to pass on knowledge.
The method has become a wider talking point at industry events, including Russian oil and gas technical conferences and the TNF industrial energy forum in Tyumen. For Matvienko, the message is straightforward: in complex B2B sales, the real contest begins long before the tender is published.
Source: Noah Wire Services
