5 Lessons We Learned Selling Unsexy Software – Like Hot Cakes
Have you ever tried explaining unsexy tech? It is not the task for the faint of heart.
If your coffee order is more than four words, you are part of the problem. The software we make rarely fits in this word count in terms of titles. Usually, the names are longer, containing such monsters as “replicator”, “extractor” and “stubbing” (no, not knife stabbing). Try explaining their purpose to someone outside the topic and you will see effort and confusion.
This is what is called unsexy tech. Applications which are hard to grasp for non-experts. Apps which solve specific issues of other software. Apps which are not for the end user but rather for those who take care of them.
The opposite of it – sexy tech – naturally receives more exposure in media: apps in mobile phones of end users are easy to understand and relate to.
What stays beyond coverage is the tech of large industries which improves business processes and manufacturing. Companies delivering innovations that make organizations more compliant, secure and productive.
If explaining the product is difficult, selling it is even worse. Yet, when your business is about it, you don’t have any choice. Each piece of advice here is a result of a tough learning process we’ve had over the years and we hope you will find it useful.
Who are we anyways?
I am from Connecting Software, a producer of integration and synchronization solutions. Usually, we target not end users but IT administrators, developers, system integrators, and consultants.
The company started modestly having many constraints of a self-financed firm from a small European country. It is now that we sell our apps to governments and large international corporations. But the road to success has been bumpy, so we are here to share some of our findings.
1. The market is not always ready to accept your solution, but you need to find its one feature that sells.
Or quoting the writer Cal Newport, “be so good they can’t ignore you”.
Sometimes, the market is not ready for your ground-breaking solutions, especially if you are playing out of your league.
In 2011, we launched Connect Bridge – a platform for software integration to Exchange server.
The platform was good but to our frustration, we didn’t even have a chance to prove its worth. Nobody believed a small IT firm was capable of it. It was a king’s class, and we were out of rank.
Our team tried to pitch the solution to various decision makers until finally got into a conversation with Technology Solutions Professionals of Microsoft Austria. What they said sounded like a challenge or a mock but in fact gave a strong kick to our sales. They said: if your platform is so powerful, why don't you solve a big security issue of the Dynamics CRM and SharePoint integration environment? (Dynamics CRM and SharePoint missed permissions and privileges synchronization: restricted data could get into wrong hands in SharePoint).
Our developers checked the software, made a proof of concept and launched the first version in four months. It was fast because we built it using our own platform. In four more months, we had the first customer for the Dynamics CRM to SharePoint Permission Replicator. Shortly afterwards, we became the world market leaders in this small niche. It is still one of our most successful products and promotes the integration platform as such.
2. Listen to your customer.
It is very rare that customers have only one problem with software: usually there are several pain points in the same business area. As our CB Permissions Replicator was getting more features and usability, we would become more familiar with other clients’ headaches. Turns out, there are various nagging issues around CRM systems, SharePoint, Exchange server and other business software that cry out for easy integration.
So, from a painkiller to one specific problem with Dynamics CRM/SharePoint we have become a suite of solutions for Microsoft business-related needs and received Microsoft Gold and Silver competencies.
Takeaway: If you are attentive to your client’s complaints – even not directly related to your product, it opens many business opportunities.
3. Turn your product into your salesperson.
A marketing strategy depends on the resources you have and the market you deal with. Are you good at sales? Are you good at engineering?
In the beginning, the situation was desperate: we knew our product was great, but we could not scale it up as we didn’t have much sales power. Firstly, because Central Europe has never been famous for gifted salespeople. And secondly, competing with saleability of venture capitalists and huge companies from the US and Britain was next to impossible.
We invested in several salespeople, but nothing worked. A person who both understood all the complexity of software integration and sold well was hard to find.
So, we accepted the failure and changed our marketing strategy.
Now our salesperson was the product.
Instead of going out to the world, we welcomed the world on our website.
The company focused on content: if a person googles how to solve a specific problem, our solution is in top results. For system administrators and integration experts it is the most popular way of solving any work issue, and for us – more effective and cheaper promotion.
This has changed our course dramatically. What we saved on hiring salespeople, we invested in project development. It also helped to keep the product price down.
4. Don’t sell the product. Sell the trial.
We never shout: “Buy our stuff”. What we say is, try our product. All our marketing efforts aim at convincing a person to install a trial version for free and see if it covers their need.
Building trust is easier when people can experiment with your product. They lose the fear of working with an unknown company from a different country or even a continent. Besides, after a trial, they better understand how much effort it took and become more open to paying a fair price.
Making your product easy to deploy, run and maintain will also help. If the need arises, our experts guide the installing and train using the product for free. This gives good results: if a client treated the trial seriously, verified its capacity for 2-3 days, we close 80% of deals.
5. Locals know better.
Big corporations often outsource their IT system management to external consultants. Build connections and turn them into your partners. Local players can have a better understanding of customer’s needs and may offer your solution before the customer even finds out that it exists. Through our local partner, we managed to close one of the most successful deals with the Department of Justice in Canada. Simply because the partner connected their needs and the solution.
***
In conclusion, selling unsexy software as B2B is much more complicated than marketing easy apps for end users. So, if you are in this business, there is a lot of work to do. We often revise our own lessons: have meaningful conversations with customers, look for new dimensions to our products, make our website content an answer to relevant requests, remove frictions in product trial and develop the partner network. And it gives results: apart from business applications, we are expanding our activities to cover integration in the Industrial Internet of Things and secure document sealing with the blockchain technology.
The future is exciting, and we are wishing you success with your complicated but very important software. This path is tough but worthy.