You’re a technology company. You have a great product. The clients that have your product love it. But you’re not getting the growth that you want. It’s time to look at 2 things: 1) the number of leads you’re getting in; 2) how you’re closing the business.
In reality, you should look at no. 2 first – what’s your win rate? why are you losing? what are the competition doing better? These are the first questions to answer. Only once you’re good at closing the business leads you have is it really worth looking at generating loads more. And, let’s be clear, you have to be honest about why you’re not closing – “the client was an idiot”, or “they don’t understand what they’re buying”, or “our product is clearly better, they just didn’t get it” simply aren’t good enough reasons. If you truly believe that to be the case, then it’s time to look at the way you’re pitching your product. If you’re losing because they want a different feature set, then start qualifying your leads a little better. If you’re losing because of price, then take a closer look at the market. Either way, make sure you know what’s going wrong. And in the cases where you’re getting it right find out why you got it right (the real reason, not the one you made up in your head). All of this is done by talking to your customers and potential buyers throughout the sales cycle and after.
Now, if you’re clear on the best way to close business for your product, it’s time to start filling the hopper with leads. Your digital marketing strategy should help you fill the hopper. We’ll focus on digital marketing, but other marketing needs to be addressed too – we’ll just focus on digital for now, because it’s generally core to the tech sales cycle.
Our strategy can be boiled down to: “Deliver relevant helpful information to your prospects that leads them to think about your product as a solution to their problem. Use digital channels.”. Let’s break that down:
- get to know your audience
- get to know what they’re interested in
- get to know how they consume information
- get to know the emotional triggers that will spark their interest in the thing that you do
- create stories that demonstrate how your product solves their problem
- get the story in front of them
- make it easy for them to contact you
Clearly there’s a lot that lies behind each of these points especially when it comes to “getting the story in front of them”, but actually if you’re doing the first 5 steps right then getting the story in front of them becomes much more straightforward than you may believe.
Want to know more? Give us a shout.