Download our software proposal template to use as a starting point to quickly put together a compelling sales proposal for your software or service. This software marketing plan template will help you develop a strong marketing strategy for your software company, including worksheets and checklists also. Software sales cycles are changing.
With the existence of Software-as-a-Service SaaS , cloud computing, and open source options, in many cases this can shorten the overall decision process for the customer. Do you have the right business model and pricing structure?
For example, moving to or adding services revenue or subscription licensing can drive increased software sales.
Check out our article on software business model planning. Also, if you have a multiple product strategy eg, a traditional software license approach, and also a SaaS offering then you need to be very careful to avoid channel conflicts in your pricing strategy, and make sure you are positioning the right product for your customer's needs, using this SaaS readiness checklist.
Find out more details here. What is your company's and your product's biggest strength in the eyes of the customer, of course and main advantage against your competition? That is your value proposition. Keep it simple. If you don't believe it, then you won't be able to make your customer believe it. Make sure that your value proposition clearly differentiates your product or service from your competition in the customer's eyes.
Remember that your "competition" may not be selling exactly the same type of product you are. If you are a licensed software vendor, your primary competitor may become a SaaS provider or perhaps open source software.
Each requires a different type of value proposition. Make sure your value proposition is clearly spelled out in the beginning and end of your software proposal. Having a compelling software sales proposal is critical to come across as professional and convince your customer that your product or service will meet their specific needs. You can download our Software Proposal Template Package here to use as a starting point to developing your own professional sales proposal.
It will really increase the effectiveness of your proposals, help you build credibility, and speed up your turnaround time to close the deal faster. Also, check this article for key tips on writing winning software proposals or you can start with this free software proposal outline. You must be able to write down exactly who your customer base is: are they in a specific industry?
Are they in small, medium or large companies? What other common characteristics do the right customers have? And who are the specific purchasers and stakeholders within your customer? Sales leaders need to hire the best talent available in the market that can sell anytime and anywhere. The best HR Software in India will help you to hire the top sales superheroes as per your business requirement. The recruiters should be clear on what skill sets and experience they are looking for in the candidates.
Well not only just hiring the best sales wizards will help your business to sell. You need to train your sales team on your products, services, and policies. Because your sales team will be the face of your brand while making a pitch to the prospects. Hence you need to have a knowledgeable, convincing, and friendly sales team.
Additionally, if the sales team is already aware of all the generic customer objections, queries, and rebuttals. They will be able to sell with confidence and have a higher conversion rate because they are ready for all the challenges. One of the most effective ways to design a successful sales strategy is to set the best sales work practices. Setting the best workflow will ensure that your teams will deliver optimum results always. The best CRM software in India will ensure your teams follow the work process set to ensure consistency.
Business leaders need to understand their goals to set the work process accordingly to make the most of their resources. Where will your sales team reach when they do not have the right direction to move.
Thus, the business sales leaders need to understand their business goals and their vision to understand where are they heading. Furthermore, the sales leaders need to divide these goals into bits and pieces for easier understanding. The goals will get further divided as key performance indicators for your sales team to achieve. These key performance indicators are nothing but individual targets which each salesperson will have to achieve.
Moreover, the goals that the sales leaders set should be ambitious but achievable. You need to understand the resources that you have what are their capabilities and how much can they achieve in a month. The top CRM software in India is a robust tool for all the sales teams irrespective of their business type, size, and sector. Because CRM tools are the superpower that your sales superheroes require to create magic for your business. The customer relationship management software in India will gather, store and process the customer data.
Additionally, CRM tools are capable of completing tedious and manual tasks automatically. As a result, your sales superheroes can just concentrate on interacting with customers to enhance the brand image. Moreover, the CRM software in India will help to create a loyal customer base that will give you repetitively and referral business.
This software solution will have all the advanced tools that help you to optimize, automate, digitize and centralize the sales operations. Therefore, implementation of the CRM system should be one top priority for your businesses to design an effective sales strategy.
If the answer to both of those questions is yes, it gets rejected. Joe Lazauskas, Contently Editor in Chief. The following graphic represents what content can be used in different scenarios. Companies should have a wide range of content to reach people of different personalities, consumption preferences, and stages of the sales cycle. The following graphic shows the type of content from left to right based on where they are in their buying stage while the top to bottom displays the engagement experience type.
Content Usage Matrix. Depending on where your solution, and organization, stand in the marketplace you'll likely have a different focus when attending live events. Here are four reasons to integrate live events with your digital marketing efforts, depending on your core marketing needs at any given time:. Especially for early-stage startups and tech companies, your main challenge may just be getting noticed in the marketplace. The goal is to simply get the word out there, so when prospects do finally evaluate solutions like yours, you'll be in the running.
For businesses in a more mature stage, it may be more imperative to generate sales leads face-to-face. Planning is critical, so make sure to reach out to key prospects well in advance to drive attendance to the event and your booth. Have systems in place for collecting contacts, qualifying leads, and setting up follow-up sales appointments either during or after the event.
Live events are a great way to meet and greet current customers in a more fun, low-pressure format. Since they're already customers, you'll be able to get to know them on a more personal level, casually discuss their success with your solution, and discover if there are any potential up-sell opportunities. Some of the most effective live event marketing that enterprise tech companies do comes in the form of educational content and workshops.
This is great for drawing in both current customers and new prospects, especially decision-makers on the technical side. Again, you'll want to collect contact info upfront prior to any training session and follow up to see what they got out of it and if they're potentially a sales-qualified lead.
Make sure to stay active and engaged on social media both prior to and after the event. Encourage employees especially your sales team to spread the word on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to maximize the chances of active prospects attending, meeting and moving further along the sales cycle. Live events can provide you quick exposure to a volume of prospects, but because you may not get much 1-on-1 time, it is imperative that you create a smart strategy to nurture and convert those leads.
First, let's start with collecting leads:. Collecting leads is important, but too many companies don't utilize them correctly after the event.
It is a waste of time and money if you don't see the process through. During your event if possible or soon after,, leads should be entered into your marketing automation the next chapter in this e-book or CRM software.
You should have a distinction set for leads that want direct follow ups versus those who are collected. Following up too hard on attendees who submitted a card or came to a workshop will just turn them away.
This process is called nurturing and should provide the lead with value while conveying your key brand messages. The key here is not to jump into selling, but instead show your prospects you are knowledgeable, engaged, and care about providing them value. Doing this first and then building up to a demo or call will open the gate rather than quick rejection from a hard sales approach.
Marketing automation helps B2B enterprise companies nurture, qualify, and pass leads over to sales when they're finally ready. This is essential in the technology space, as both pre-sales and sales cycles can last weeks, months, and even years. What tool you use will depend on the size of your company, as well as the nature of your solution and target buyer. Here are three of the most popular and effective marketing automation tools that you should consider implementing within your organization if you haven't already :.
One of the most powerful and popular marketing automation systems on the market. If you're currently using SalesForce. Marketo is great for managing and segmenting lists, as well as delivering rapid-fire email content. However, Marketo hits it's limit and begins to slow down if your web page experiences high amounts of web traffic, or leads in the database exceed k. Recently acquired by Oracle and now under their Marketing Cloud umbrella, Eloqua is a robust B2B marketing automation platform that outperforms Marketo with large databases.
Eloqua also has what is considered the best customer and prospect insights engine, giving marketers detailed and granular analysis of how users are reacting to marketing emails they receive.
The major downside to Eloqua is that it has so many capabilities that the user interface is often non-intuitive and difficult to execute. Now part of IBM's marketing cloud, SilverPop is a competitive enterprise marketing automation solution that differentiates itself with more mobile, text and SMS marketing capabilities than the competition. It has an intuitive UI user interface , a user-friendly database structure, and allows for relative ease of email creation.
On the downside, Silverpop doesn't have as many native integrations as Marketo and Eloqua, and tends to slow down when processing large data sets. There are many other Marketing Automation Systems available and now many are part of a platform that also includes CRM, Customer Service, and a wide range of other features.
If you are an organization looking to generate leads for sales teams, then Marketing Automation combined with lead scoring can significantly improve your entire approach to marketing.
A process of automating follow-ups to potential customers. Open an email, they get 5; click a link, they get 10; visit a page, they get Combined with automation, we can consistently reach many people and create a ranking of the most engaged prospects. The organization of prospects into like groups or leveraging data to target prospects with information most relevant to them. Segmentation is one of the most important topics in marketing and is central to marketing automation.
These three aspects are only scratching the surface of marketing automation but they should be enough to peak your interest to learn a lot more about what platforms like these can do for your marketing — especially for technology and software companies. Efforts and investments here can pay off many times over. Not only can you increase the spending of existing customers, but by staying top-of-mind with them, you create an army of advocates building referrals.
Most companies miss the opportunity by not putting a serious and thorough plan specifically for customer remarketing. Here are three of the main ways that you can remarket to increase the lifetime value of current customers:. If your customers are having great success with your solution, they're probably logging in daily, if not more. How you design and maintain your customer portal can contribute to ongoing marketing efforts to your current customers.
The last thing you want to do after you onboard a new customer is to remove them from your marketing automation program. However, it's a common mistake that many B2B enterprise tech organizations make.
What you want is to design separate nurturing programs for existing customers. The number of touches might be more infrequent, and the messaging will be much more consultative. Your existing customer nurturing program should include things like webinars, customer success workshops, and live events in their area.
By seeing the topics of webinars customers attend, for example, you'll gain some insight into what their ongoing needs are and if there are any additional features or services they might be interested in purchasing. Building out customer forums and communities is another great way to keep current customers engaged with your brand on a consistent basis.
While customers will work with each other and your employees to maximize the value they receive from your solution, you should use communities to continually establish thought leadership through high-value content. If you have a new whitepaper or eBook coming out, customer communities are a great place to announce it to get the conversation going and to see which customers are interested in that specific topic.
Any customer marketing program should utilize multiple channels and tactics and should be measured and adjusted over time to work best for your specific customer base. Below are two graphs that show what existing marketers focused on customer retention and marketing do and what channels are found to be most effective. If you do not already have a customer marketing program, this data might help you decide where to start:.
Source: Demand Influence Survey. Source: Gigaom. Whether enterprise technology, enterprise software or SaaS — customer marketing works. For SaaS companies, specifically where MMR Monthly Recurring Revenue occurs at higher volumes of users, there can be even more at stake with high churn rates. Drift Relationship Marketing. Churn can be deadly for a SaaS and high churn is often a signal of issues whether from market fit, features, user interface or support. The challenge here is that if you are losing a percentage of customers each month, it takes significant new customer acquisition just to maintain growth.
This puts a lot of pressure on top of marketing efforts to spread awareness and gain conversion at often unsustainable rates. That being said, if a SaaS business focuses on existing customer programs and marketing, they can minimize churn and reduce the need for often frantic new customer acquisition tactics.
Calculators help leads crunch the numbers on things like costs, ROI or any other metric they might find interesting. These are great for people to understand and estimate the direct ROI impact of your solution based on their specific situation. Calculators range from simple to complex, depending on the amount of customer inputs you want to include.
The more data that you ask from prospects, the more confidence they'll have in the accuracy of the results. Also consider the outputs. Whatever the key metrics your solution addresses sales revenue, customer satisfaction etc. Akin to static infographics, interactive content brings interesting stats to life in a visually compelling way. Interesting data, facts and findings that you haven't previously used in marketing collateral can also be utilized in an interactive infographic.
Plan to use these in the early to mid stages of the marketing and sales cycle, as they're mainly for building awareness around either your product or major challenges in the industry that your solution is designed to address.
If you've been to websites like Buzzfeed, you're familiar with online quizzes. They're great because prospects feel like they're getting some personalized insight from you, and are easily shareable on social media. Consider repurposing some stats and figures from your whitepapers into quizzes, giving prospects incentive to test their knowledge after they've finished reading. Another way is to utilize quizzes at live events.
Have reps at your booth with an interactive quiz available on their iPad and have customers take it on the spot. These are like quizzes, but dig deeper into a prospect's business needs. They help your potential customers get a handle on the current state of their business, what needs improvement, and how your solution could possibly fit in.
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