This is video number two in our video series on how to sell software to businesses and we dive into the subject of reaching out. We divide this video into four sections:
- Finding Contacts
- Prospecting Cadence
- Organizational Movement
- Concentrated Prospecting
Finding Contacts
The first step in reaching out with how to sell software to businesses is to find contacts. There are two main ways that you can find contacts at the businesses that you are targeting – 1) you can buy lists or leads from list brokers or subscription database services, and 2) you can find contacts on LinkedIn.
Buying contacts can be quicker but the main downside is that by the time contacts get added to a database and then purchased by you, it is very likely that a major portion of the leads you purchase are old and outdated. LinkedIn is different from that in that it is some of the most up-to-date contact information available because contacts are responsible for keeping their information updated.
Prospecting Cadence
The biggest challenge you face with how to sell software to businesses is simply getting connected with prospects. You could have the best product and the best price, but neither of those will do anything for you if you aren’t able to talk to your target prospects.
To help with this, we recommend a thorough process of contact attempts and utilizing different contact methods. We call this process a prospecting cadence and we explain that in this video.
Organizational Movement
Contacting the prospect more is not guaranteed to help because there are some prospects that will never answer your phone calls or respond to your emails. With that, we also need to implement what we call organizational movement and this is moving throughout the organization to find another way in.
The first type of organizational movement is vertical movement, and this is moving up and down the different levels of the department you are calling into. For example, if you are trying to contact the VP of IT and can get engaged, you can move up the organization to try to reach the CIO. And you can move down in the organization to try to reach the Director of IT.
You can also use horizontal movement to move to a different department. If you can’t get a hold of anyone in IT, you can move to a different functional department like operations or finance. Of course, the secondary department will need to be impacted by what you sell and in most cases, the software can be sold to both IT and usually a business unit or department that is a consumer of the software.
Concentrated Prospecting
The last topic that we discussed regarding how to reach out with how to sell software to businesses is concentrated prospecting. This is a tactic to work smaller lists of target prospects in order to create a great concentration of contact attempts per contact. It might sound like a no-brainer, but it can be easy to end up working a long list of accounts or contacts and this can negatively impact your ability to get engaged by diluting your outreach attempts per contact.
We hope this helps gives you some ideas for your strategy with how to sell software to businesses.