Software companies are competitive. It’s the name of the game. This means that a few companies will get left in the dust while others continue to grow. This can be a hard pill to swallow, but you don’t have to stay down in the dust. Taking your software sales to the next level will be difficult, but it’s well worth the fight. With dozens of new software companies launching daily, you’ll need to gain momentum sooner rather than later. Keep reading to learn how to take your software sales to the next level and have the most successful year yet.
Invest In Your Employees
The first step to success for any business is to build a strong foundation. Your employees represent your business. If one employee is slacking off, others will have to pick up their weight. This common phenomenon will lead to burnt out employees that will eventually find a new career. Your clients will also notice if your employees are burnt out or stressed. It will negatively impact your company’s reputation. If you’re not sure where to start, try having a 1-on-1 with your employees to figure out how they’re feeling. If you don’t think they’ll be completely honest with you, have them meet with another member of management or your HR team. Their honesty will help your company grow, even if it’s on the negative side.
Set Goals
Setting goals is one of the best ways to figure out how your company is doing, and how it can improve. By setting S.M.A.R.T. goals, your team will be able to see how they achieved their goal, or see exactly where they fell short. The acronym S.M.A.R.T. stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. This means when you and your team set goals, you’ll know how to achieve them. An example of a goal that follows this rule would be “To increase our LinkedIn ad conversions by 10 in January by running a 20% off promotion”. As you can see, this goal follows all of the S.M.A.R.T. guidelines. And, if you didn’t achieve this goal, then you could look at your LinkedIn analytics to see exactly where you fell short.
Understand Your Sales Funnel
By understanding your sales funnel, you will know where most of your prospects fall out of your funnel. Then, you can constantly make optimizations to your sales and marketing to try and push prospects further down your sales funnel. As an example, if you offer your prospects a free trial, there probably will be fewer leads that convert after the trial than the amount that started the trial. To try and shorten this gap, you can use remarketing, offer a discount, promotion, or another special offer that will entice them to become a paying customer. Understanding your sales funnel will help you plan new initiatives and hopefully convert more prospects into paying customers.
Change or Update Your Current Marketing
Far too often companies get stuck in their old ways. They fear trying new things and are unsure where to start. Just because a sales or marketing tactic has worked so far, doesn’t mean it will continue to work. Or, work better and drive more results. It’s best to start small and work your way up from there. If you take on too many changes, it can get overwhelming to analyze and compare all of your data. When you update your marketing, try to note why you decided to make certain changes, so you will remember down the line. In addition, setting goals is a crucial part of marketing, so I highly suggest setting goals to help your team quantify your marketing efforts.
Offer a Free Trial
Offering prospects a free trial of your product before they commit is one of the best ways to increase software sales, increase qualified customers, and increase customer satisfaction. By offering a free trial, whether it be 7 days, 14 days, or even 30 days, your prospects will have the chance to use your software risk free and see if it’s something they would benefit from. In addition, you reduce the risk of onboarding clients that are not the ideal client. If you’re a B2B company, you probably know all about direct consumers inquiring about your product. When your clients are in their trial period, it’s important to stay in contact with them. By staying in contact with them, you’re more likely to answer their questions and successfully turn them into paying customers. It’s helpful to create an onboarding sequence that provides them with helpful information, tips, and the opportunity to book a live demo or view a personalized interactive demo.
Optimize Your Demos
You may be asking yourself what a personalized interactive demo is. This technology is relatively new for B2B companies, but is quickly becoming a game changer. A demo software, like Demowell, will help you create a walkthrough of your demo experience. It includes adding popups, voice overs, the ability for clients to ask questions, videos, and more to your demo experience. You also have the ability to enter in your client’s information to personalize their demo. Add in their logo, key contacts, data, and other use cases that will help them envision what it would be like to use your software without creating an account. You can embed a demo on your landing pages for prospects to click through, send to clients, or conduct a live customized demo. The options are truly limitless with a demo software.
Website Personalization
Website personalization is another software taking the B2B market by storm. Again, it’s a relatively new technology. But, it can be the difference between your company converting a prospect versus your competitor. A website personalization software will target your website visitors based on their company’s industry, demographics, geographics, or other firmographics that you set. Then, it will show the visitor information that is specific to what they would be looking for. As an example, if a marketing agency were to visit your website, your website would know to show them specific use cases, case studies, and other vital information about other marketing agencies that you have helped in the past. This way, they don’t have to go searching through your website to find what they’re looking for. Add in a custom call to action, and they’ll have a hard time saying no! Check out this article to learn more about website personalization.
Offer Integrations
Integrations are one of the best ways to get new clients for both your company and the integrating company. Integrations are quickly becoming an expectation for software companies to have. But, it’s a very lengthy process to release multiple integrations. If you want to quickly offer many integrations, you can look into a solution like Zapier. Zapier is a software that will allow your company to integrate with thousands of other softwares. If you use Zapier, you’ll only have to do one direct integration. Then, your clients can choose from Zapier’s impressive list of integrations to use. Although Zapier is a great option, it’s also a good idea to create your own direct integration so you don’t have to depend on another software. Especially since your clients would have to pay to use Zapier, your software, and the integrated software.
Offer Annual Plans for a Discounted Price
Price is one of the main considerations that companies take when choosing a software. To entice companies, you should offer an annual subscription to your software at a discounted price. Usually companies choose a discount of 20% to make it worth choosing the year-long plan. Annual plans are a great asset to any software company as it can reduce your churn rate. If you offer an annual plan, ensure you include information about refunds and cancellations in your Terms of Service on your website. Whether or not you offer refunds is up to you, but I find most software companies do not provide refunds for early cancellations.
Stand In Their Shoes
When you are trying to enhance your software sales and marketing, it’s important to stand in your customer’s shoes. By looking at the situation from their point of view, you can understand their pain points. As a result, you can better target them with marketing and sales initiatives that will solve their problems. Every client will have different pain points, which means you will need to frame your pitch slightly differently based on their needs. As an example, if a prospect is looking to switch from a competitor to your company, you’ll need to focus on why you’re better. This could include being cheaper, easier to use, better customer service, and more. But, if your client is a small business looking for their first software, you’ll need to have a completely different understanding of their needs and a different sales approach.
Follow Up
At every chance you get to improve your relationship with clients, you should take it. When a client has a demo, signs up for a free trial, lets their trial expire, after their first month on a paid plan, or other scenarios, you should take the opportunity to follow up. Following up needs to be important for both your marketing and sales teams. It can be done in many different ways, including via phone call, direct email from your sales team or an email in your onboarding sequence. Taking the extra step to ensure your client is happy will reduce the chance of them leaving for a competitor and will hopefully increase the chance of them referring other companies to yours. Their feedback is vital for your company to improve for future clients.
Ask for Reviews
Prior to choosing a software solution, many prospects will look at your reviews on G2. When a prospect is researching your company, they will compare your reviews with your competitors. So, it’s important to ensure your star rating and reviews are the same or better than your competition. If you do receive a bad review, reply back and try to rectify their complaints. Acknowledge their issue, provide a solution, and provide them with an email that they can use to reach out to. This will show prospects that you have good customer service and you value their opinion. If you don’t have a lot of reviews, that’s more than okay. Add an email to one of your email drip campaigns a few months after using your software and ask them for a review on G2. If you don’t see an increase in reviews, you can always offer a giftcard to Amazon.com or a discount on their service.
Wrap Up
As you can see, there are a lot of different sales and marketing tactics that your company can use to increase software sales. The SaaS industry is competitive, and it can be hard to stand out from the crowd. But, if you do your research and constantly optimize your software sales and marketing tactics, you should be able to drive a lot of success. If you’re not sure where to start, I would recommend asking your loyal clients what they would like to see from you. On the other hand, I also recommend talking to your marketing team to see where they think there are gaps in your current lead generation tactics. I hope you were able to learn a few new tips and tricks to help take your software sales to the next level!