Selling intangibles like software is a challenge. If your company has any of the following business models, this article can help you increase sales:
You sell custom software development projects
You sell software licenses that the customer pays for in perpetuity or under a software as a service scheme
3 ideas to increase sales in a software company
In both schemes, technological mastery is necessary, but it will be of no use if the company is not able to generate more projects or license sales with greater profitability.
Companies don't buy software, they buy a business outcome
Focus on selling the value of the technology. These two questions will help you to dimension the value: How much is the success of your implementation worth to the customer? Maybe automating a process will make the customer $50,000 in profit. What is the cost to the prospect if they don't implement the software? If the customer doesn't automate the process, they'll probably make 20% profit instead of 30%.
To achieve greater profitability for a software company, it is important to be able to predict the closing of future projects so that the workflow is stable. That is, the work team has projects to execute and there is a “floor” of income that supports the operation, but that the work peaks do not exceed the installed capacity.
3 Ideas to increase sales
Offering additional software solutions or services to your current ecuador phone number data customers: A software project involves a great deal of uncertainty, given that there are multiple risk factors. Current customers are key pieces of the business strategy, since they have already trusted the company's capabilities and work. Therefore, cross-selling other additional solutions or services allows you to increase the customer's lifetime value.
To achieve this, it is important to make an adequate diagnosis from the beginning of the collaboration and throughout the first projects, to thoroughly understand not only the specific problem we are solving, but also the objectives, challenges and processes of the business. In this way, it will be possible to make constant pre-sales throughout the implementation and sell future solutions or services.
Increase renewals or upgrades of software licenses from your current customers: A common mistake that leaves money on the table for software companies is the lack of follow-up on renewals and/or upgrades, mainly because this depends on the efforts of the vendors.
Automating this process gives the company control and increases sales opportunities. Once the software renewal or upgrade date is identified for each client, personalized communications can be sent through automated emails, creating a sequence of emails with a certain period of anticipation.
Attracting potential clients for new projects: In our experience, generating leads is the most difficult challenge for software companies, since their projects depend on referrals or updates to clients. In addition, in most cases the client does not know that they need the software, that is, they know the symptoms but not the root of the problem.
A strategy that has worked for us to generate new clients is to integrate an account-based marketing campaign under an inbound approach . Because it allows us to generate trust in the different people who make a decision and channel efforts towards those accounts or clients that are most relevant to your company, providing them with personalized communication that solves their business problems.