How do you sell your Services and Software?

Dear Friends and people working in Sales or Business Development, we need to talk.

You really need to review your approach toward prospects.

Usually, I do not take part in many sales pitches and when I do it is because I have already a specific interest or need.? For several reasons in the last 2 months, I probably took part in more than 10 different pitches for different tools and in different areas and these are my considerations. Spoiler alert, some of you might find these points helpful and some others will find them annoying.

But as someone said, “If you want to annoy someone, tell him the truth”, so let’s go!

1. ? ? ? Avoid approaching people with an unsolicited sales pitch, instead, create compelling content that attracts people toward you. Every single top manager probably does get 10 to 20 unsolicited emails or LinkedIn messages every day, these messages are completely useless and a waste of time. If someone is accepting you on their LinkedIn network, promote your company through relevant content, case studies, customer testimonials, ab test results, and interviews, do this with the newsfeed, and engage in comments, but do not send unsolicited DMs!

2. ? ? ? Do not trick people into calls with excuses and make a sales pitch, you will lose their trust, instead, create occasions to understand their needs and priorities, and if possible do it offline. Build a Relation with your potential customers, ask them about their priorities and plan, do not force not needed solutions, and try to understand your potential customers' challenges, their priorities, and their roadmap. Only if you have a relevant solution go to the next phase. If you sell a customer something he does not need, he will not renew the contract, and the next time you will try to pitch another solution will not even pick up the phone. It is clear to everyone what is the economic circumstance we are all in, companies are mostly in cost control, and the probability of landing a new customer is minimal unless you know exactly the need of your prospect and you have the perfect solution for it.

3. ? ? ? If you do not get an answer to your first message, do not send a second one, you have been ghosted, and it is not personal. If a top manager gets 20 messages a day and needs to reply properly to all of them, this adds up to half an hour a day. If someone is taking the time to answer you and is telling you that he is not interested, stop being pushy, stop counterarguing, and appreciate already that a person that has 0 interest in your solution took the time to tell you that does not need your solution. Instead, focus your effort on strengthening your company's digital presence, and strengthening your online reputation on portals like trust radius, g2, and Gartner. Nowadays if someone has some specific needs will not go to LinkedIn to check who is the business developer available in the market, but first will go on specific portals to see the company and the tool's reputation and what other customers are saying about it and then look for a company representative.

4. ? ? ? If you get a chance to make a pitch, focus on your solution, and do it with hard facts, your prospects already know your brand and probably have also done some early research on your company and solutions, don't spend time on what is known, or on how big or how cool you are as a company, at this point we want to see the unknown. Make it clear what your solution does and what does not. Avoid buzzwords, and explain what makes you different, what are your strengths, in your tool, in your processes, and your people. Nowadays tools are not differentiating that much for their capabilities, but for example, a proper support team or a customer success manager following a specific implementation blueprint could make a huge difference.

5. ? ? ? If you are pitching a technical solution, do not mention these 2 words “seamless integration” – If you do so while being on a call with people that have a fair understanding of any tool integration you are ringing a considerable alarm bell in their head! Speak honestly about the integration effort, the technology used, the integration with tools you have already out of the box, what needs to be a custom integration, and what is a fair comparison of time to market. Do not oversimplify just to land a prospect.

6. ? ? ? From the first meeting, get all the info you need to indicate where your pricing might end up, no one wants to lose time, providing a reference based on the volume of a customer should be a requirement of the first talk, of course, this price can deviate (but not that much). Provide a comparison, a company of similar size usually pays that money, and these are variable costs you might want to consider.

7. ? ? ? Do not do ROI Calculations upfront, these are all perceived as fake and bogus. Engage with your prospect and build a proper ROI estimate while getting an understanding of the specific business metrics and business dynamics.

8. ? ? ? If possible, provide a POC, minimum 4 months, max 6 months, this doesn’t have to be free! If you do offer a solution and you pitch it with an ROI estimate before we engage in a longer contract you need to prove to me that your promise is real and that you will do everything you can in terms of support and optimization to help me reach what you have promised.

9. ? ? ? When in meetings or even before, never ask who the decision maker is, you show that you care only about closing the sale instead of creating a partnership. Focus on who will be the business owner for a given solution. Do not focus your talk on winning the Senior, focus on convincing the end users. In my case, I do not take the decisions on tooling, I provide and secure the budget, but the decision is with my teams. Do not focus your call or pitches talking only with the person with the highest role in each round.

10. ? If you land a customer, make sure your company supports the customer with a proper implementation plan, customer technical support (if possible, with low latency), good customer success management, recurrent business, and technical reviews. Closing a contract is just the first step, but if you want to develop a long-lasting partnership you will have to continue working on it.

I am happy to have partners that are living up to these standards, they know, and have experienced how painful and long are the negotiations and technical assessment with us before we enter into a partnership, but they have also experienced what it means to be our partners once everything is signed. We work together with them on a recurrent basis, we are their hard-core user continuously testing and stressing their products, and we are there to make suggestions on what can be done better or differently for the end users, and we provide their ideas with market traction for future product development.

To the rest of the people still using these old tactics to grab people's attention, please stop, you can do better than that.