This is video number two in our video series on how to sell software to businesses, where we dive into the subject of reaching out.
How to Sell Software to Businesses Video Series
- Video 1 – Strategy
- Video 2 – Reaching Out
- Video 3 – Gathering Info
- Video 4 – Sales Process
- Video 5 – Generating Leads
- Video 6 – Demonstrations
- Video 7 – Closing Deals
TLDR
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 are added to a database and then purchased by you, it is very likely that a significant portion of the leads you purchase are outdated. LinkedIn is different from that in that it is one 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 often isn’t guaranteed to help, because some prospects 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, which means moving up and down through 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 the organization 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 we discussed regarding how to reach out and sell software to businesses was concentrated prospecting. This is a tactic for working with smaller lists of target prospects to achieve a high concentration of contact attempts per contact. It might sound like a no-brainer, but it’s easy to end up working a long list of accounts or contacts, which can negatively impact your ability to get engaged by diluting your outreach per contact.
We hope this helps give you some ideas for your strategy on how to sell software to businesses.
