Bold Session Recap –Strategies for Selling Development and IT Services
In a recent Bold Session we spoke to Andrejs Juščenko, Co-founder and CMO of IBD Consulting, about optimal strategies for selling dev and IT services.
Andrejs has over 20 years of experience in B2B sales and marketing in the technology sector. During his career he helped tech companies create demand, increase sales, and grow business through go-to-market planning and end-to-end execution.
Below, a recap of the session.
Could you tell us a bit about the state of the market and buyer mindsets? What challenges does the industry face?
I think that we’re definitely seeing a change in the buyer’s mindset. I think most of us noticed that there’s quite a strong trend of distrust towards media, politicians, salespeople and so forth. A traditional sales approach, let’s say 10 years ago, was very much salesperson-driven. With digitalization we can see that the buyer is much more involved. A recent Gartner study showed that 95% of the buyer journey is done by buyers themselves. That means that the entire journey—from realizing the problem, looking through different sources of information, turning to different opinion-makers, and ultimately, finding a solution—is done without a salesperson.
The fundamental challenge these days is to establish a sense of trust between the customer and the company. Branding was perceived as a waste of money in the B2B world more often than not, but it’s becoming an increasingly important factor in differentiating your company from the rest.
There are a few different ways you can build trust as a B2B company, but the one I advocate for the most is being visible to your customers. I’m not saying you should be spending millions on billboards and expensive ads, the kind of branding I’m talking about is more about being present. Be present at events, conferences and all other places you think your potential customers might be at. Build your brand on your expertise and competence, drive thought leadership activities and participate as an expert at industry events. Building your brand that way will pay off.
What do you feel buyers are looking for when considering B2B products?
As I said before, first and foremost, they’re looking for someone they can trust. They probably don’t want a salesperson that is just on the lookout for new deals and doesn’t offer any kind of value in return. Buyers are looking for long-term relationships with vendors, they want someone who can help them solve specific problems while minimizing possible risks of failure associated with a project.
Despite pricing being perceived as key criteria during the purchasing process, research shows that the ability to demonstrate strong industry and solution competency is way more important for making a vendor selection.
Source: Damandbase 2021 B2B BUYERS SURVEY REPORT
There’s also value in innovation in the development part. The solution that potential clients are looking for is supposed to make them more efficient both time-wise and cost-wise. That provides vendors with an opportunity to showcase a unique solution at a higher price point.
Clients want someone who understands their business, processes and issues. This is why specialization comes in handy—you have a proven track record, customer references, and solutions which are tailored to this specific problem. You can specialize by looking at your past projects and finding commonalities, like technology, industry, workload or business processes. By combining those different components, you can come up with a general heading.
Specialization is also a license for a higher price point. You eliminated all the generalist solution providers and you’re competing based on your competence and the added value that you’re bringing onto the project.
How can agencies simplify the buying process?
Buying has become ever more complex than the selling process because buyers have to sell the product internally, they have to justify the budget they were given and they have to make sure everyone is aligned with the decision.
A simple way of reducing risk for buyers and making the process easier is offering a packaged service. Instead of them buying hundreds of hours of your work, deliver the service in a fixed scope, a fixed timeline and for a fixed budget. Be creative about the way you package and price your services.
The next step would be simplifying the process of selling the product internally. To be able to do that, you need to understand your potential buyers. There are three key points you need to know about your buyers:
- Company profile: Do they represent your ideal company profile? What problem are they trying to solve with this purchase?
- The decision makers: In the B2B world, a single decision-maker is a rarity, most of the time there is a group of people involved with making the final decision. You need to understand what drives them and what the motivation behind this purchase is. Knowing this, you’ll be able to prepare the data, business cases or benchmarks if needed, to make the process smoother. A workshop is a great option for this as well, be proactive and move things forward.
- Decision making process: What does the formal process look like? Does the company have an evaluation process, do they need piloting or proof of concept? The bigger the customer is, the more complicated the process usually is. The best way to go about this is to directly ask the customer.
A great way to get the information you need would be customer interviews. It doesn’t cost anything, but with the gathered data you can greatly improve your processes and selling practices.
Any key takeaways here?
Going back to Gartner’s recent study—it’s really important to understand that only about 5% of the market are in the active buyer position. The majority of your potential customers are not in that position yet, and you have to approach them accordingly.
The role of a sales or business development representative is to facilitate a buyer’s journey by educating potential buyers on the problem and ways to solve it, providing valuable insights, sharing best practices and product expertise.
Don’t rush to sell. Instead, aim to build trust early enough, nurture, and activate potential customers so that when they are ready to buy, you are their default trusted choice.
