1–10 of 20 posts
1. How to find customers?
2. How to sell?
Let me know your experience and how you learned to sell software.
Cheers.
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A “good way” seems to be to cold call / cold e-mail businesses that would benefit from the product. This is sadly considered illegal in germany. The only way to get in contact with them would be if they sign up for a mailinglist, which needs a lot of marketing money. Maybe someone knows other good ways?
Attending events, conferences, etc. is not possible either during the pandemic.
2020 doesn’t seem to be a good year trying to start a company :(
Asking myself the same question, it seems hard while starting out especially for B2B. A “good way” seems to be to cold call / cold e-mail businesses that would benefit from the product. This is sadly considered illegal in germany. The only way to get in contact with them would be if they sign up for a mailinglist, which needs a lot of marketing money. Maybe someone knows other good ways? Attending events, conferences…
I am still learning myself and for me selling online not face to face is the focus. I have failed a few times to get anything off the ground but technically people have paid me money so I have sold software! But usually less than the time and money I have put in.
My next move is to understand more about market validation and research, or how to get in the shoes of potential customers. Hopefully that’ll increase the chances of my next thing making money.
If you want to sell as a job rather than start a business that might be another question entirely I’ll leave that to the sales people to answer!
Firstly, it starts with identifying a problem/frustration that your customers will value. You’ll need to be very specific because what does selling “software” really mean? Focus on what your users can do with your software and how you can help them.
As others have pointed out, B2C is also different than B2B but within B2B, there are many sub groups within it. For example, company size and industry.
To find customers, it helps by knowing who your users are? Are they developers, analysts, etc.? Then you’ll also need to know how your users can purchase software - is it their own decision? Their boss’ decision? IT’s decision?
To be able to sell to enterprises, your product needs to be incredibly valuable (order of magnitude better than their existing process). However, that’s just the beginning for enterprise sales. You’ll need to demonstrate and prove your product and in most cases, business stability before getting the sale. However, the average contract values could be $100k+ to over a million in enterprise. You also have the option to expand to other teams within the same enterprise.
To be able to sell to smaller companies or startups, it’s an easier journey but nonetheless, in most cases, you still need to prove the value of your product.
Asking myself the same question, it seems hard while starting out especially for B2B. A “good way” seems to be to cold call / cold e-mail businesses that would benefit from the product. This is sadly considered illegal in germany. The only way to get in contact with them would be if they sign up for a mailinglist, which needs a lot of marketing money. Maybe someone knows other good ways? Attending events, conferences…
2020 could also be a good year because while not people are buying, there’s more time to explore and have conversations.
Asking myself the same question, it seems hard while starting out especially for B2B. A “good way” seems to be to cold call / cold e-mail businesses that would benefit from the product. This is sadly considered illegal in germany. The only way to get in contact with them would be if they sign up for a mailinglist, which needs a lot of marketing money. Maybe someone knows other good ways? Attending events, conferences…
Cold calling businesses is definitely not illegal in Germany if you got the contact info from their website.
I work as the technical counterpart to a bunch of sales reps, so I can't speak to #1, but I can help with #2, I've seen what makes good reps and bad reps and have gone through lots of training with them.
When you're just getting started in a new industry, it's important to understand how your customers buy software. Based on your price point things are going to be drastically different. Can a solo engineer pay for and expense the software or are you going to have to work your way up the chain to get the C-level involved in the purchasing decisions? The sales cycle in these two cases will be on complete opposite ends of the spectrum.
If it is B2B, what types of companies are you targeting? 10 person startups or 100,000 person massive corporations?
It is important to understand your landscape.
From the personal side, it is ideal to be empathetic towards your prospects. Understand that (at least initially), the people you are selling to don't care about you and are only talking to you because they are interested in a solution to a problem they are facing. Far too many people try selling before they understand what the prospect is actually trying to solve.
Rather than jumping on to a call with a prospect and demoing your tool and every feature under the sun, don't try to sell them at all on your initial conversation. Instead, spend your initial call with a prospect on understanding their problem and what they are currently doing. Try to understand how this problem actually affects them. If this is purely a nice to have, you probably aren't going to have any luck with the sale. But if you can discern that this is a $100k problem for them and your software is $10k then you'll know this is worth pursuing.
You may get pushback that they just want to see a demo, but if your product is like many enterprise tools, it has a lot of features to check all the boxes. Just showing up and throwing up all the features in a demo is the way to ensure that nobody is enjoying it. You would have to give a boring generic demo and the prospect would have to hear about a bunch of features that aren't relevant to them.
Instead, when you spend the first call understanding their problems, when you present your own solutions in future conversations you can actually target their specific needs. It's a much more compelling story when you are demoing to their exact needs rather than your assumptions about what people want to hear since everyone is different.
There is a whole lot to sales, and I could go on for a long time about tips I've learned. But I think most important of all is to build relationships with people. Genuinely try to help them solve their challenges and you'll gain trust and respect from your prospects and customers.