We know that sale pitches can be a bumpy road, especially when your sales funnel is drying up.
You might have resorted to wasting your time with least prospective clients, but it is worth noting that in order to sell your custom software, you’d have to do more than that. In fact, you’d have to revamp your sales strategy completely. After all, you are facing a deadly competition in your niche and all of the budget wars are making it hard for you to survive in the mainstream.
You are supposed to have a system that lets you generate enough leads and also try to maintain a robust connection with those leads. Well, there are many ways in which you can do that, but relying on word-of-mouth should be the last thing to do.
In the case of maintaining relationships to get sales, the best practice is to target the existing customers as Market Metrics reports,
The probability of selling to an existing customer is about 60%. The probability of selling to a new prospect is 5 – 20%.
As you can see, it is definitely fitting for a sales manager or company owner like you to focus on the existing customers. However, with this, you should not forget the 5 – 20% mark as for the sake of scaling, you’d have to consider fishing for them as well.
So, what exactly could you do to scourge the market to find clients?
Among your sales techniques of selling custom software, there are certain practices that you are supposed to follow in order to hit the jackpot. Of course, new clients aren’t going to descend from the sky and knock on your door, you are the one who’s going to go out for the hunt, devise a proper bait, and capture the game by all means.
Yes, we’re using harsh words because we all owe it to the competition. We are the hunter trying to lure the prey into the sales trap.
Taking it that way makes you want to look for the exact set of tools that could help you secure deals and areas where your prospective clients are present in large pools.
We have curated a list of 6 best sales techniques which you can use as tools and also some areas where you can find your clients.
1. Use Quora and Clarity
You might have had a sense of the two – even slighter. These are the platforms that are not really for “socializing” just like the other social platforms and yet they have users in millions.
Quora alone is used by 190 million users per month.
Also, what’s good in it is that you would find sensible sales strategies applied by people like you as you go on and read their answers. You, too, are to apply the same set of strategies and trust us when we say that those are better than taking the notorious route of spam.
You could also hit Twitter and LinkedIn, but they’re likely to consume much of your time and energy.
The strategies we talked about above are simple. All you’d have to do is sign up on Quora and Clarity, and look for the questions that have been asked by business owners, or regular people pertaining to your field of expertise. Once you find them, strive to answer them as comprehensively as you can. Quorans and Clarity users only look for clarifying answers and that could help you generate possible leads. But to let that happen, at the end of your answer, don’t forget to add the links to your homepage.
2. Hit those local events
Socializing on the internet is lukewarm. You barely get to be heard. Therefore, it cannot beat the manual or offline socializing.
In fact, 72% of the people who do networking say that they’ve benefited from face-to-face meetings.
We don’t mean you join a random party and start distributing your business cards. Instead, what you’re supposed to do is look for the business events that are being held near you – the events that are related to the niche of customers or clients that you are going to target.
In the event of finding events, you can rely on the recommendations or news of your friends. However, the best way to find them is using platforms such as Everbrite. It is way easy to use it. Just click browse and look for the events under your specific category. Don’t forget to take your business cards with you and stay relaxed while you are meeting prospective clients during the event.
3. Think about hosting a webinar
Webinars help you talk upfront to your sales leads all at ones. Sure, the one-to-ones are fruitful in their own regimes, but you wouldn’t need to do that once to hold tight to conducting webinars.
Over 60% of all the marketers use webinars as their marketing strategy.
However, with that, also bear in mind that to make webinars successful, you’d have to find a question that your customers or clients are asking. The best place to start digging for it would be platforms like Quora and Clarity. Once you find the question, it should act as a fodder for your existing clients to find answers to it in your webinar. Some of them can be driven towards the webinar by email marketing while those who aren’t on your email list can be targeted by advertisements on social media.
4. Pitch for the journalist
At any moment in your life, if you get featured as an expert on any popular blog post, journal, or any other media such as a popular podcast, you’d hit the jackpot for sure.
Journalists are always looking for experts and stats that could back their stories or provide necessary backbone to it.
Therefore, if you offer any journalist a bit of your insight on the topic they are covering, we’re sure you’d get plenty of clients once that story gets published.
Telling them to cover your story might not work; however, you can start by providing them your expert opinion on at least a part of the story. Your goal should be to get at least a paragraph about your opinion, if not the whole of the article.
5. Where possible, automate certain processes
You can follow the above techniques if you want to generate leads, but you should know that all of them require you to flex your major muscles. In doing so, you might notice in the long run that certain mundane but important processes are left behind. Therefore, to tackle them, you should automate them. While you can use separate software to do that, you wouldn’t be able to control your expenses of managing them at all.
For this purpose, you’d have to rely on programs that are all-in-all. Undoubtedly, one of those programs is the CRM. It is a software that lets you manage your customers and the relations you have with them. It also lets you automate many processes such as tasks with the data entry or even certain repetitive processes.
6. Create meaningful and targeted content
Content is not only the king, but it is also the key to gather the interest of your audiences in your business. Start by doing a weekly blog, guides, videos, podcasts, infographics, and more. However, in doing so, your focus should be on creating meaningful content.
60% of all the content created by the brand is pure clutter and offer little value to the customers.
Therefore, the content you are to create should educate your clients and at the same time has the necessary call-to-action to channel them through the website towards better areas.
In order to get your content out there, use tools such as Wordtracker, email marketing, and social media marketing, including the paid ads.
Summary
So, this was all about the 6 sales techniques that you can apply in order to find clients and sell your custom software. All of them are proven strategies and they can be followed by anyone who wants to have prospective clients and want to increase his or her network in order to scale his or her business.
