How to sell software products
How to Sell Software to Businesses - Part I: Strategy
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so if you're implementing a strategy
where you're selling your software to
upper level management you can focus
your messaging more on business value
and if you shift to talking lower in the
organization to Frontline managers you
can focus more on the technical value
hello it's Michael helper with sales
scripter and in this video we're going
to talk about how to sell software to
businesses now this is a very big
subject and we're going to really dive
in and go through our recommendations
for how to do this step by step and with
that there's a lot to talk about so
we're actually going to break this out
across multiple videos the strategy
reaching out gathering information sales
process generating leads meetings and
presentations and then we'll wrap up
with closing deals so let's start out by
talking about creating a strategy that
increases your odds for Success now I
personally believe that most salespeople
use a strategy that's fairly simple that
kind of starts with we have software
that we want to sell so let's talk about
our software as much as we can to as
many businesses as we can and that
usually looks something like this we'll
send emails and make calls where we say
something like this this hi this is
Michael Halper and I'm with company X we
sell or we provide product decks this is
what it does this is how much it costs
do you need what I sell and I think that
this is a very traditional approach that
the majority of sales people use and I
refer to this as product selling you
have a product you want to sell you go
out and you talk about your product as
much as you can to as many prospects as
you can now that actually sounds like a
pretty logical approach but the problem
with that is that when you communicate
in this way you sound like a salesperson
that's trying to sell something and when
you're talking to prospects that get
sold to a lot that will trigger more
guardedness prospects will then give you
objections and try to get rid of you and
when you face more objections you're
going to have to deal with more
rejection on a daily basis and when your
approach is just to try to sell your
product to every prospect that you cross
paths with you're more likely to waste
your valuable time because you're trying
to sell your product to prospects that
likely don't need what you sell now
we're here to talk about our strategy
for how to sell software to businesses
and I want to propose to you to go about
it a different way almost to go about it
the opposite way and in some ways what
I'm going to share with you is
counterintuitive your instinct is to
talk about your software as much you can
but I'm actually going to share with you
an approach where you talk less about
the software that you're trying to sell
and you might end up talking to fewer
businesses not more and so instead of
talking about your company and product
what we recommend you do is focus more
on the benefits that your product and
Company can deliver to the prospects
you're talking to and talking about pain
points and problems that our product or
our service or our company can make go
away and instead of primarily talking
about our stuff we want to talk about
the prospects and learn about the
prospects that we're engaging with and
the best way to do that is by asking
good questions and then once we learn
about our prospects and identify that
they need our help and they need the
product or service that we sell we can
then introduce our product and our
company as a solution to their needs and
a solution to their problem and we can
share customer examples as a way to
educate the prospect on what it is we do
and what we sell and how we can help and
instead of focusing on getting a new
customer our goal in our Communications
focuses more on just moving the prospect
through our sales process now this is
our approach we refer to this more as a
consultative selling approach because
it's more focused on learning about the
prospect learning about their needs and
then introducing what we sell as a
solution to what they need now with this
approach you will decrease how much you
sound like a salesperson that's trying
to sell something and you'll sound more
like a business person or a consultant
and with that you'll trigger less
guardedness from the prospects that you
engage with and because there'll be less
guard did you'll face fewer objections
and less rejection and because you're
learning more about the Prospect and
only talking to businesses that need the
product that you sell and that need your
help the leads that you generate will be
higher quality leads and because you're
working higher quality leads you'll
minimize the amount of time you waste
talking to poor quality prospects and
trying to sell your product to prospects
that don't need what you sell now when
you compare these two approaches at
first glance product selling might
actually seem easier because you really
have to think and plan less about what
to say because if all you're doing is
talking about the product when you send
emails and when you make calls you
already have a lot of product knowledge
in your head so it's fairly easy just to
go out and talk about the product that
you sell but because of that and because
you look like a salesperson trying to
sell something it's gonna be more
difficult in terms of facing more
objections and more rejection on a daily
basis with consultative selling it could
be a little bit more difficult because
if you're asking good questions and
talking about benefits and looking for
pain points you might actually have to
think a little bit ahead of time and
plan more about what you're going to say
and that could be a little bit more
difficult but because you are using more
of a consultative selling approach and
looking less like a salesperson trying
to push a product you'll face fewer
objections and rejection on a daily
basis and you'll generate better quality
leads and closing will be easier so
overall once you get your planning and
organize what to say consultative
selling will make selling easier and
more successful and in many ways more
fun and we actually have a process that
makes the thinking and the planning for
the consultative selling approach easier
and that process starts with thinking
about what is the product that you sell
and I'm going to go through this process
step by step and what you can do is you
can follow this same process with the
product and software that you sell and
so the product that I'm going to use is
a fictional product that I created for
inventory management software and so
when you're thinking about what you sell
let's try to brainstorm some of the
details of what it include in terms of
features so our inventory management
software provides it includes an auto
inventory replenishment feature
predictive demand forecasting and a
management dashboard then I recommend
you go on to think about how is the
software that I sell different from the
competition so our software is able to
be set up without any Professional
Services easy to use and there's a lower
management and maintenance cost with our
product compared to the competition the
next step in the process is to stop and
think about who are we going after who
are we trying to meet with who are we
going to be communicating with with this
sales message and so if we think about
some of the different people that we can
talk to to try to sell our product you
might want to think about going after
different Industries maybe we can sell
our software to different verticals
manufacturers hospitals Banks government
institutions you might want to think
about the different size of
organizations that we sell our software
to small businesses or large Global
organizations the size of the
organization could impact your strategy
and could impact what you say and ask
you can likely sell your software to
different departments in a business yes
you sell software and most likely you
can and should sell your software to it
but you could probably also sell your
software to other departments in the
organization like Finance or HR or
marketing and inside the Departments
that you're selling to are many
different titles and many different
levels so what level of the organization
are we going to be trying to meet with
and sell to all of these characteristics
could impact our strategy and what could
have a direct impact on what you say and
ask with your sales message and you
could create a different sales message
for the different departments or the
different levels in the organization or
the different Industries now if you're
just getting started I'm a firm believer
in crawl walk run so before trying to
create different sales messages for all
these different scenarios a good first
step is just to create one sales message
that we could use for everybody and to
do that you can use a broad target
audience like businesses or individuals
or people and this allows you to create
one sales message and one set of talking
points that you could use for everybody
and if you do use that then you could
come back later when it's time to walk
or run and create a second sales message
that targets a particular industry or
create a sales message that targets the
C Level for demonstration purposes I'm
going to select the target audience of
Manufacturers the next step in the
process is to think about the value that
we have to offer and in most cases I try
to keep things simple here and I
recommend to just think of three to six
different improvements that your product
can help deliver for the target audience
but since we're talking about how to
sell software to businesses which can be
very challenging and very competitive
I'm gonna actually make a recommendation
to get a little bit more advanced here
so instead of just thinking generally
about improvements that you can make we
can divide the improvements that we
deliver into three different categories
so at the lowest level we can deliver
technical value and this is how our
software can help to improve the
processes or systems or people on the
prospect side for example we might be
able to automate manual tasks make
something work better make something
easier improve the access to information
or visibility and when our software
delivers technical improvements that
will usually work its way up to create
business improvements such as decreasing
costs increasing the income or revenue
for the business and when our software
helps to create business improvements
and Technical improvements we can often
create personal improvements for the
prospect that we're actually selling to
so if we're working with the CIO or the
VP of Technology when they purchase our
software for their organization and it
creates all these Technical and business
improvements we can often help that VP
of it to have personal improvements like
help them to increase their personal
income from bonuses or career
advancement or decrease their workload
and improve their work life balance and
by going this extra step of breaking the
value that we deliver into these three
categories it can help with selling
software in a couple different ways
first of all getting this detailed helps
us to make sure we're not missing
something because when we're talking
about software it can be easy to
primarily talk about and think about
technical improvements because software
can be a fairly technical product and
you can forget to think about and talk
about business improvements so this
process here will help you to make sure
you don't leave out any business
improvements or leave out some personal
improvements that you can share with the
prospect this process of also separating
out your value can help you to tailor
your message so if you're implementing a
strategy where you're selling your
software to upper level management you
can focus your messaging more on
business value and if you shift to
talking lower in the organization to
Frontline managers you can focus more on
the technical value so first of all if
we start with thinking about technical
improvements what we can do is we can
bring back the features and the
differentiation that we just
brainstormed we want to keep in mind the
target audience for the sales message
that we're creating and what we can do
is we can look at our features and our
differentiation and think about do any
of these help to make something work
better help to make something easier
decrease the time it takes to do
something improve visibility and access
to information and we can look at these
one at a time and if any of these do
help in those areas then we can start to
compose a few thoughts as to how it does
that so our inventory management can
help to decrease time spent ordering
increase ordering accuracy and improve
visibility to real-time information and
once we have that we can then brainstorm
business improvements that we can
deliver and what we can do is we can
bring back the technical improvements
that we just came up with and still
keeping in mind manufacturers and we can
think about do any of these technical
improvements help to increase revenue or
income or decrease costs or expenses or
decrease risk improve the customer's
product and we can look at these one at
time and each of these can often lead to
a business Improvement such as
decreasing Staffing and labor costs
decrease inventory costs and improve
decision making and we can use our
technical improvements and our business
improvements to think of personal
improvements to identify that when we
deliver these Technical and business
improvements we can help to improve
work-life balance increase recognition
and compensation and improve career
trajectory and once we have that we can
move to the next step of the process
which is brainstorming the pain points
that we can help make go away for our
target audience and my typical
recommendation here is to try to think
of three to six pain points and
challenges that your product or service
can make go away but again since we're
talking about selling software to
businesses my recommendation is to break
the pain that we can help to solve into
three different levels such as technical
pain which is pain that's felt in the
area of processes systems or people and
when the businesses that you sell to are
experiencing technical pain that can
often lead to business pains such as
lower Revenue higher cost impacted
delivery of services and the prospect
that you're selling to if their
organization is feeling Technical and
business pain that can often impact the
prospect that you're selling to in the
area of income and career and work
environment and if we break the pain
that we can help solve into these three
levels again we can make sure we're not
missing any pain points that we should
be talking about with our prospects and
we can also tailor some of our messaging
depending on who we're talking to in the
organization so if we start out think
trying to think about any technical pain
that we can solve with our software what
we can do is bring back the technical
improvements that we just came up with
because each of these improvements
usually has an opposite pain point that
it helps to solve so what we can do is
we can ask ourselves what is the
opposite of this Improvement or what
problem goes away when we create this
Improvement so looking at each of these
improvements one at a time we can come
up with these pain points and then if we
move on to try to think about some
business pain that we can make go away
we can bring back the business
improvements that we came up with and go
through the same process success to come
up with a list of business pain points
that we can make go away and when we
move on to personal pain points we can
go through that same process and use
those personal improvements to think of
personal pain points that we can make go
away for the person that we're trying to
sell to and the next step of the process
is to think about good questions to ask
I personally believe the best
salesperson is the one that asks the
best questions and you can agree with
that but still not know what questions
to ask but what I'm going to show you
here is a process you can use to create
an Optimum list of questions to ask and
always have good questions to ask and it
starts with creating what I refer to as
pain questions if we just came up with a
great set of pain points that we can
help to solve there's a question that we
could ask for each of these pain points
to see if the prospect has that pain or
has that concern so what we can do is we
can look at these one at a time and ask
ourselves what question could we ask to
see if the prospect has that challenge
or concern and by going through these
one at a time we can come up with an
Optimum set of pain quests questions to
ask our Prospect there's another
category of questions that I recommend
you ask which I refer to as current
state questions these are questions that
try to identify what is the prospect
doing in the area where you have
something to sell so if you sold cars
you should ask current state questions
of do you have a car today what are you
driving what year is it how many miles
does it have do you own it do you lease
it so these questions will be unique
depending on the product that you sell
and I can't tell you exactly what
current state questions you should ask
but I can provide a list of areas that
you might want to think about asking
about so certainly you should ask a
current state question to see if a
prospect currently has what you sell who
they're working with gather details
about current systems or processes learn
about people in the organization learn
about current contracts or expiration
dates any sizing details current
performance maybe the last time they
looked at purchasing something similar
to what you sell and with that list we
can come up with these current state
questions for selling Inventory
management software the next step in the
process is to think about a customer
summer example that we can share when
we're talking with prospects and here's
a four-step process that you can go
through to create a very concise tight
customer example for the product that
you sell you might want to think of a
customer that you helped or sold your
product to that's similar to the Target
buyer type maybe think of a problem they
had before they started working with you
what did you sell them to solve that
problem and then try to think of two
improvements that your product or
service helped to create for that
customer and so going through those four
steps we I can come up with this
customer example here for selling
inventory management software to other
manufacturers now going through that
step-by-step process each step creates
what we would refer to as building
blocks and you can use those building
blocks to create a cold call script we
can use those same building blocks to
create an appointment script we can use
those building blocks to create a cold
email campaign we can use those building
blocks to create voicemail messages we
can use those building blocks to create
objection responses now as you can see
there's a lot of different documents
that we can create with all of those
different building blocks and I don't
want to take time in this video to show
you what all of those different
documents look like for a couple reasons
first of all it would make this video
extremely long and second of all I've
already done that in another video if
you want to see a lot of the different
combinations that you can create with
those building blocks and your sales
message if you go through that process
all you have to do is go to this
playlist on our YouTube channel the
smart sales system sells smarter not
harder and then video 4 is titled
writing sales scripts this video we
basically show you how to mix and match
all those building blocks to create a
lot of different documents so I'll
include a link to that in the
description below now while you can use
that other YouTube video to create all
of your different documents if you want
to save yourself a lot of time all of
those documents and more are actually
found in the sales scripter software we
have this feature here called the sales
Playbook which is a library of documents
these documents all mix and match those
building blocks to create all of these
different scripts and email messages
voicemail scripts and there's an area
here called the sales message Builder
which takes you through that process
that I just showed you here that
step-by-step process of of brainstorming
the product that you sell and then who
are you going after how do you help
problems you can help to solve and
questions you should ask all of these
steps are here in the software and the
software takes you through that process
step by step and it makes creating your
sales message much easier so we'll be
talking a little bit about how sales
scripter aligns with this video series
and how it can help to sell software to
businesses and we're providing a
promotional package a jumpstart package
in parallel with this video series so if
you want to do everything that we're
we're showing you here in this video
series here is a package that will help
you to do that so with this package
you'll get three months of the sales
scripter Pro you'll get two hours of
Consulting with me personally and with
this Consulting package what I do is I
go through that brainstorming process
with you step by step so I help you to
brainstorm all the best details about
the product you sell the benefits that
you deliver the pain points you should
be talking about the questions you
should be asking and also with this
package you'll get 50 hours of LinkedIn
searching and email guessing that will
make more sense in the next video when
we talk about reaching out and finding
prospects I'll put a link to where you
can purchase this in the description
below this is a limited time offer and I
only mention that because this video is
going on YouTube where it will likely be
for a very long time so we reserve the
right to not offer this pricing down the
road if you happen to come across this
video so that's pretty much it for this
first video of building your strategy
for how to sell software to businesses
in the next video we're going to talk
about finding Prospect specs and
reaching out so we look forward to
seeing you on the next video if you have
questions or you want more information
the best place to go is salescripter.com
if you want more sales tips there are
plenty of videos there are actually
ebooks that you can download for free on
our website if you have questions of the
product of sales scripter there are a
lot of demo videos that show you all of
the different features of the software
if you want to contact us this is the
best place to go you can get our phone
number email address there's a chat
window as well thanks for being here and
again we look forward to seeing you on
the next video have a great day take
care bye
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